Refugee Week 2021

https://refugeeweek.org.uk/

This year’s refugee week begins today, 14^th June 2021 with the theme ‘we cannot walk alone’. The aim is to encourage all of us to reach out and help someone new. This week is close to my heart as border criminology is one of my key research interests. I am strongly committed to impactful research, activism and contributing my time and resources to helping refugees and making those fleeing persecution feel welcome in the UK’s hostile environment. As the resident border criminologist, I want to introduce Refugee Week activities at the University of Northampton but also to suggest how we can help ensure nobody walks alone.

The University of Northampton is hosting a week of talks in conjunction with Northampton Town of Sanctuary. Beginning on Monday at 2pm we welcome Gulwali Passarlay who fled Afghanistan at the age of 12, travelling alone through 8 countries to the UK where he was eventually granted asylum. Having spent the last few years interviewing, supporting and advocating for refugees I have heard many stories of survival. No two have been the same but each shares such painful paths that I cannot imagine. Each time I hear a refugee speak about the situations they fled I feel humbled, and grateful that despite its array of flaws, the UK is safe. In our Outsiders module, students were recently asked to challenge assumptions of minority groups. Hearing the stories of refugees from the mouths of refugees is enough to shatter any assumptions, rhetoric and media narratives about those fleeing persecution so for those who have undertaken or will sit the module next year this is a must!

On Tuesday 15^th June at 2pm there will be an introduction and update to the City of Sanctuary movement.  Being a City (or Town) of Sanctuary means committing to becoming a place which welcomes those seeking safety. The movement extends to universities, many of which offer Sanctuary Scholarships to asylum seekers and refugees. The Northampton Town of Sanctuary movement wants the University of Northampton to become a University of Sanctuary. Dependents of asylum applicants who arrive in the UK as children, go to school and college here, make friends, speak English, and have GCSEs and A-levels, are then unable to continue in their education as they would be liable to pay international student fees. Asylum seekers currently receive £39.63 per week from the government and are prohibited from seeking employment. They are not entitled to student finance. They are at the end of the road, forced to sit quietly and wait for the letter to come through their door with a decision.

In my own research, many of the asylum seekers I interviewed had been in the asylum process for years. For those who arrived as children and attended school here, once they left college and all their friends were going to university, they were left behind with nothing to do. This had enormous impact on their mental health and their sense of identity. They hid their asylum-seeking identity from their friends in fear of judgement, creating false narratives about who they were. This was often due to past experience of xenophobic abuse after disclosing their immigration status at school. Upon leaving school they would further advance these false narratives, making up stories about why they were not working or going to university. Just one of the people I interviewed managed to secure a Sanctuary Scholarship, despite many of them submitting applications. Having seen the impacts of exclusion from higher education, I want to see every university being a University of Sanctuary, but let’s start with the University of Northampton.

The third talk of the week is delivered by Emma Harrison from IMIX, an organisation which delivers valuable work in changing the conversation around migration and refugees. We’ve all seen the headlines and media reports of ‘illegal immigrants’ (the term ‘illegal immigrant’ infuriates me but that’s another future blog). We’ve heard Priti Patel’s plans to overhaul the ‘broken’ immigration system. The plans include further criminalisation of people seeking safety, avoiding death, rape, persecution, war; and extreme sentencing rules for those who help them reach a place of safety. The media and political rhetoric are relentless and a change in the conversation is desperately needed. I often feel hopeless about my work, that the work of myself and other border criminologists falls on deaf ears. I was at a conference a few weeks ago where the keynote was discussing the abolition of immigration detention. Immigration detention is pointless and harmful and research outputs have been good at pointing out the harms but perhaps we need to tell them what they want to hear: immigration detention is a pointless waste of money. I am looking forward to listening and hope I can pick up some tips to alter the way I communicate findings to different audiences. This talk is on Wednesday 16^th June at 2pm.

The final talk of the week is delivered by a representative from the British Red Cross on Friday 18^th June at 11am. The British Red Cross do a range of invaluable work from practical support such as supplying clothing and food, to finding missing family members of people seeking sanctuary. The talk will be focussed on the work the organisation does in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire during the pandemic. One of the first things I intend to do when I move to Northampton is to familiarise myself with the local service provision for refugees and asylum seekers and get involved so for me this will be a good place to start.

I encourage all our students to attend at least one of these events. They are all virtual so you could even listen while you sunbathe in the park. To attend, please email Nick who will forward a link. For our students who are interested in supporting refugees, we have a Student Action for Refugees branch at the university who coordinate student efforts to help refugees. There are many other ways we can all contribute to making sure people do not ‘walk alone’. We can read books such as Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains or The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla, or watch one of the films free on the British Film Institute’s Refugee Week event. We can have conversations with others and try to think about what refugees might be going through. Next time you see a news report about a conflict talk about what you would do in that situation, what belongings you would take, which of your family would you leave behind? Having conversations such as these helps to build empathy and compassion. We can go further to challenge racist and xenophobic assumptions. I often ask, ‘what is your fear?’ to which I can invariably rationally explain why whatever they disclose will not materialise. Do one, all or some of these things. But I implore you to do SOMETHING to contribute not only to Refugee Week but to making the UK a more welcoming place.

Article posted by amycortvriend

Originally posted on Thoughts From the Criminology Team and reposted with permission.

U.S. Police Academies Overemphasize “Warrior” Training of New Officers

---

John Sloan is Professor Emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham whose research interests include police recruitment, training, and ethics.

Gene Paoline is Professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida and former Chair of the Division of Policing for the American Society of Criminology whose research interests include police culture, use of force, and training.

The trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on charges of second degree murder in the killing of George Floyd in May of 2020 has brought into sharp relief the training U.S. police officers receive. Evidence presented to date in the trial shows that Chauvin misused physical constraints officers are trained to use when responding to someone who is resisting arrest. The prosecution claims Officer Chauvin’s purposeful misuse of the constraints directly resulted in Mr. Floyd being asphyxiated.

 The killing of George Floyd is but one in a long series of well-documented incidents over the past decade where unarmed citizens in the U.S., disproportionately people of color, experienced excessive – including deadly – force by police during the encounter. As a result, heated debate continues in the U.S. over policy responses to police violence. Some critics have opined the only option is to abolish the police and replace them with other systems of public safety. Others have urged defunding the police and redirecting that funding to other areas such as mental health, housing, and other programs. Still others have argued what is needed is “reimagining” police training by completely overhauling it.

Questions about the training of U.S. police officers are not new. During the 20^th century, for example, at least three major commissions were created to reform the police and included a focus on police training. The most recent example of such a commission was the President’s Task Force on 21^st Century Policing convened by the Obama administration and which focused a great deal of attention to perceived deficits in both basic law enforcement training (BLET) for new hires as well as in-service  training for officers on the job. Among others, the Task Force recommended the federal government partner with training facilities to promote consistent standards, establish training innovation hubs involving universities and police academies, and create a national postgraduate “institute of policing” for senior-level police officials that would include a standard curriculum preparing them to lead agencies into the 21st century.

The problem as we see it, is little research has been conducted on BLET and most of what has been done has focused on basic training occurring at a few academies. In fact, a large portion of BLET research involves case studies conducted at  a few academies. To our knowledge, no national-level studies of U.S. police training academies – where most BLET occurs – have been published since the 1980s. To remedy this, we have been examining the structure and organization of BLET using data collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics from the population of U.S. academies offering such training in 2011-2013, the third wave of data collection (a fourth wave of data has been collected and is currently being prepared for public release). The BJS census compiles information on the number and type of staff employed, academy budgets and sources of funding, number of officers trained and their demographic characteristics, policies and practices, and training curriculum.

To understand the importance of BLET, it’s important to place it into a larger context relating to how new officers are exposed to and begin the process of socialization into their occupation. For example, in America, these individuals have been recruited into policing and gotten through a rather extensive hiring process that includes civil service tests, background checks, drug tests and polygraph exams, and one-on-one interviews with department officials in charge of hiring. Another major hurdle is completing BLET at a police academy.

New hires are typically “sponsored” by the hiring department and while technically they can attend any of the approximately 600 accredited academies operating across the U.S., they usually attend an academy preferred by the hiring department, often one the department operates. And while one can classify academies any number of ways, we suggest there are two basic types: law enforcement agency academies (LEAAs) operated by or formally affiliated with municipal, state, or county police departments, and academic institution academies (AIAs) operated by or formally affiliated with two-year or four-colleges or universities or with local public school systems through “career centers” or similar operations. About 56% of U.S. academies are LEAAs and 44% are AIAs.

On average and regardless of which type of academy attended, new recruits will be required to complete about 837 contact hours of BLET –  about 21 weeks of eight-hours-per-day, five days a week – which, in its own right, is impressive and suggests new officers are not being rushed to the streets. Most of the contact hours (about 680 hours on average) consist of training in the BLET “core curriculum” that includes six substantive areas that in turn are comprised of specific topics: operations (seven topics), weapons/defensive tactics (three topics), “special topics” (16 topics), self-improvement (six topics), legal issues (three topics), and community-oriented policing (COP) (four topics). Using various methods including lecture, scenario-based training, and adragogy (adult focused learning), both full-time and part-time academy instructors deliver the training and evaluate recruits’ performance using different tests, including written, oral, and skills- or competency-based.

Research we’re conducting on BLET curricula at U.S. academies reveals several interesting patterns. While between type-of-academy differences exist, we nonetheless find striking similarities:

• About 54% (~369 hrs.) of total core basic law enforcement training hours are devoted to just two areas: operations (33%; ~225 hrs.) and weapons/defensive tactics training (21%; ~144 hrs.). More specifically, training is devoted to topics involving patrol tactics and procedures (25% of operations hours) and criminal investigations (21% of operations hours), along with firearms skills (47% of weapons/defensive tactics training) and defensive tactics (42% of weapons/defensive tactics training). Only about 6% (~42 hrs.) of total core training hours are devoted to COP and topics like cultural diversity and conflict management;
• About one-quarter (24%) of total training hours in the core area of “special topics” are devoted to the use of force. The remaining 15 topics comprise the rest of the training hours;
• Just over one-half (52%) of training hours in self-improvement are devoted to physical fitness. The remaining hours are devoted to five topics including communication, professionalism, ethics & integrity, stress mitigation, and the basics of a foreign language.
• Overall, approximately three-quarters (74%) of the total BLET hours are devoted to just 13 (of 39) topics, all of which seek to develop in new officers skills largely associated with “traditional” aspects of policing like use of (lethal) weapons, emergency vehicle operations, criminal investigations, report writing, traffic enforcement and accident response, patrol tactics, and criminal/constitutional law.

To be clear, we are not suggesting topics such as patrol tactics and criminal investigation should no longer be included in BLET. However, as Sue Rahr and Stephen Rice have cogently observed, “fueled by post 9-11 fear”, American policing “veered away from Sir Robert Peel’s ideal that ‘the police are the people, and the people are the police’ and toward a culture and mindset more like soldiers at war with the people [the police] are sworn to protect and serve”. Rahr & Rice also argue “The seeds of [the warrior mindset] are planted during recruit training, where some recruits are trained  in an academy environment modeled after military boot camp”: a model that produces a warrior ready for battle and to follow orders and rules. The problem is while patrolling, most of the time no supervisor is present to “give orders” to officers. Rather, they are largely on-their-own to decide how to respond to myriad situations encountered when interacting with members of the community who are often people of color who neither look like the officers, or come from similar backgrounds.

To Rahr & Rice’s point about the academy “sowing the seeds” of police-as-warriors, if one assesses the proportion of time allocated to traditional policing functions – compared to training hours in non-traditional areas such as communication, cultural diversity, ethics and professionalism, and stress management – the scales clearly tip in the direction of the former. In fact, hours allocated to all of the “non-traditional” topics are less than the hours allocated to just firearms skills training or to just defensive tactics involving exerting physical control over people who are resisting officers’ efforts to arrest them.

Over 80 years ago, the American police reformer August Vollmer bemoaned the lack of personnel standards relating to officers and available training for them. Since then various commissions – convened to investigate allegations of inappropriate police behavior (individually or organizationally) and identify best practices for effective crime reduction, while building and preserving community trust – have either indirectly or directly focused their attention on the importance of police training, including that received at police academies. Thus, for nearly a century, police scholars and practitioners alike have argued the nation’s police officers should receive either more training, better training, or some combination of the two. Few of these assertions, however, have been buttressed with empirical evidence.

Our ongoing research into BLET finds that police recruits do not seem to need more training: on average, basic training involves more than five months of full-time activity. Rather, what is needed is providing recruits with different training. However, achieving that goal necessitates a complete reorientation of the BLET curriculum to deemphasize traditional aspects of policing like operations and weapons/defensive tactics geared toward teaching recruits about and preparing them to “go to war” that is too often waged disproportionately against citizens of color in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This new curriculum would instead emphasize to recruits the need to develop skills in communication, stress management, building partnerships with the community, and problem solving. Recruits would also internalize mounting evidence that procedural justice is inexorably linked to police legitimacy, especially in communities of color; understand that greater diversity brings strength, not weakness, to the ranks; and learn how to make ethically sound decisions while simultaneously advancing professionalism within policing. While this reorientation will likely encounter resistance, if American policing is to survive current existential threats to its continued existence and rebuild the trust that has been lost in so many communities, the choice seems obvious.

Contact

John J. Sloan, III, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Email: prof@uab.edu

Twitter: @SloanProf

Eugene A. Paoline, III, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Central Florida

Email: Eugene.Paoline@ucf.edu

Website: https://ccie.ucf.edu/profile/gene-paoline/

Photographs courtesy of authors and 88192456@creativecommonsstockphotos|Dreamscape.com 

Tips for a Successful Twitter Conference

James is Chair of the British Society of Criminology’s Green Criminology Research Network and an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Nottingham. His research interests focus on crimes of the powerful more broadly and environmental harm more specifically. His current work looks at the social construction of environmental deviance.

Twitter conferences reach huge audiences. During its two-day symposium, 62,000 people viewed tweets from the Green Criminology Research Network’s account. Twitter was the main vehicle for advertising the event, contributing to 1,800 people viewing the call for papers and 2,100 the subsequent speaker schedule. Over 120 people watched keynote addresses from Dr Angus Nurse and Dr Jenny Maher in real-time. All in all, not bad for an event that cost nothing but time to organise or attend.

Twitter is a relatively new medium for academic conferences. It provides ‘speakers’ with the opportunity to share their research in five or so tweets over fifteen minutes. This is then followed by a fifteen-minute Q&A, a time-limit mainly there to encourage audience movement between papers. With only 1,400 characters, presenters are encouraged to be inventive. The Green Criminology conference saw a mixture of images, videos, charts and text being used to effectively communicate research.

With the prospect of repeated and regional lockdowns on the horizon, Covid-19 brought to the fore issues of accessibility and predictability. These were compounded by widespread restriction of university travel budgets and an intensification of workloads incurred by the rapid shift to online teaching. In this context, preparing for a face-to-face conference seemed futile. Accounting for these circumstances, and taking cue from the Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, among others, the Green Criminology Research Network steering group decided that a Twitter conference would be the best way to proceed.

On reflection, Twitter conferences primarily benefit from their inclusivity and accessibility. Anybody with a computer or smartphone can participate and – no longer bound by transport costs, travel time or prohibitively expensive conference fees – almost anybody can attend. Even those in different time zones can use the ‘schedule Tweet’ function to post their ‘paper’ in advance or just catch up with Tweets after the event has ended. Indeed, the Green Criminology symposium hosted over twenty speakers from nine countries, including Israel and Australia. There is also no need to share slides following an event or ask permission to record video-streams because Tweets can be viewed long into the future (provided they are not deleted). However, such benefits are not without their challenges, two of which can be overcome with a little preparatory work.

First, without adequate guidance on what is ultimately an unfamiliar conference format, there is potential for exclusivity. The format may deter those unfamiliar with Twitter, or indeed digital technology more broadly. This is not an inherently bad thing. It may provide a platform for less familiar scholars to present their work, opening up a space for ECRs, and allow technically capable scholars to showcase skills unfamiliar at traditional conferences. Nevertheless, inclusivity is favourable. So, the Green Criminology Network established ground rules from the very start aimed at preventing uncertainty or ambiguity. The call for papers therefore included sections on ‘How will the Twitter Conference Work?’, ‘What if I don’t have a Twitter Account?’, ‘Presenter Guidelines’, ‘Tips and Tricks’, and offered examples from other conferences so people could see how the format worked in practice.

Second, without some way of organising relevant Tweets from the myriad of individual Twitter accounts, there is potential for disorganisation and fragmentation. To address this, three ‘navigation points’ were created through which people could access the conference. First, the Speaker Schedule used Microsoft Sway to link to speaker abstracts and Twitter accounts, providing direct access to papers. This removed the need to navigate Twitter and improved inclusivity among those unfamiliar with the platform. Second, a short, relevant, and consistently used hashtag was important. #GreenCrime2021 was used in the initial call for papers and in every conference tweet prior to, during, and after the event. This provided an easy search term for those wanting to gather all conference tweets in one place. Third and finally, the Tweet Schedule tool provided automatic signposting from the network’s official Twitter account. A Tweet linking to each new speaker, with a title of their paper, was scheduled to send 5 minutes before they were due to present. This meant that anyone could navigate the conference in real-time simply by accessing the network’s Twitter account.

While these measures ensured a successful Twitter conference, it is worth noting that the lack of face-to-face interaction was felt. Questions were asked, answers were forthcoming and discussion ensued, but the inability to see others was a notably absent quality. This is where face-to-face conferences always have the upper hand, whether in-person or over video-call. Indeed, it is for this reason that Twitter may be better suited to research showcases, PGR-conferences, or alongside traditional conferences as a means of expanding the reach of papers. In whichever manner they are used, Twitter conferences have their place. It is worth remembering, however, that their success is contingent on effective preparation; a little of which goes a long way.

Watch again

Keynote video from Dr Angus Nurse

Keynote video from Dr Jenny Maher

Contact

Dr James Heydon, University of Nottingham

Twitter: @Jwheydon

Photographs courtesy of author