Police stops in Germany – between legal rules and informal practices
Journal of Organizational Ethnography
ISSN: 2046-6749
Article publication date: 1 March 2022
Issue publication date: 20 June 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This paper analyzes micro-political strategies that police officers use during police stops, mostly based on their professional or personal life experience. Police stops take place in an asymmetric power relationship. Actions of police officers during a stop are backed by strong legal powers, and citizens typically do not negotiate how the stop should be carried out.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with German patrol officers.
Findings
The authors demonstrate that micro-political strategies relying on the officers' personal experience, rather than on strategies developed by the police agency based on empirical evidence, are highly problematic. Depending upon the acting officer, micro-political strategies can vary considerably according to the individual officer’s experience and attitudes. This leads to a risk of discrimination in police stops and of potential infringements on the citizens’ fundamental rights.
Research limitations/implications
See the paper’s methodology section on the limitations of the empirical approach.
Practical implications
The paper suggests improvements for the practice of police stops.
Originality/value
The article provides new empirical insights in the practice of police stops in Germany and situates the findings in a broader international debate on police stops and shortcomings of the legal rules that govern the police stops.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the participants of the COST Action on Police Stops (CA 17102) who provided useful comments on previous versions of the article. The paper presents results from the MEDIAN research project on the development of mobile technology for police stops, funded by the German government (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF, Förder-Kennzeichen 13N14799). In the context of this project, the authors conducted interviews, organized group discussions with police officers in a number of German Länder regarding police stops and carried out ethnographic observation in police stations and during police patrols. The authors conducted interviews and focus group discussions in German and translated them into English for this paper. The MEDIAN project particularly focused on mobile applications for police smartphones that facilitate and accelerate police stops on the spot, comparing fingerprints and facial images of the individuals stopped with the biometric data that is stored electronically in their ID documents and in police databases (see Bosch et al., 2021 for further information on the technological aspects of the project).
Citation
Aden, H., Bosch, A., Fährmann, J. and Thurn, R. (2022), "Police stops in Germany – between legal rules and informal practices", Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 116-131. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-03-2021-0016
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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