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Actual debates around the Swiss police see a decrease in respect and an increase in attacks toward police officers. Such non-respect can be seen as a lack of feelings of obligation to obey the police. Instead of asking whether such a proclaimed increase in disrespect is indeed happening in Switzerland, this chapter analyzes aspects of legitimacy. It builds on the question whether the population sees the Swiss police as a legitimate force.

Swiss police’s legitimacy will be elaborated in two parts. After giving an overview about current debates, known theoretical aspects of legitimacy will be outlined. These aspects build the ground for empirical analyses that follow. Results are based on data of the European Social Survey ESS5.

The Swiss population sees the police as a legitimate force. The majority morally align with the police, they feel an obligation to obey their directives, and they ascribe legality to their actions. Furthermore, also procedural fairness is highly ascribed to the Swiss police. Finally, age correlates only with certain aspects of legitimacy. While moral alignment increases with age, as well as positive views about police’s procedural fairness, no effects were found for feelings of obligation to obey. However, elderly people more often see a political influence on police’s decisions and actions.

While in Anglo-Saxon countries research on legitimacy of the police is broad, no analyses are known for Switzerland so far. Moreover, topics around the Swiss police are often emotionally debated in media, with a lack of empirical evidence. This chapter contributes to close this gap. It gives an insight on the population’s perception of the Swiss police and offers an important scientific foundation for actual debates.

Purpose – Police violence involving minority citizens is a significant problem in the United States. Efforts to explain the disparate treatment of minorities have often relied on structural-level racial threat hypotheses. However, research framed by this macro-level approach fails to consider meso-level characteristics of spatially specified places within cities. The place hypothesis maintains that police see disadvantaged minority neighborhoods as especially threatening and, therefore, use more violence in them. Reconceptualizing the racial threat model to include meso-level characteristics of place is essential to better explain police violence.

Design/methodology/approach – The argument is investigated using literature drawn from quantitative analyses of structural predictors of police violence and qualitative/quantitative studies of the police subculture and police behavior within disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Findings – Research on the effects of city-level racial segregation on police violence supports the place hypothesis that the incidence of police violence is higher in segregated minority neighborhoods. City-level segregation is, however, only a proxy for the degree of concentrated minority disadvantage existing at the meso-level. Community-level studies suggest that the police do see disadvantaged places as especially threatening and use more violence in them. Plausibly, meso-level neighborhood characteristics of cities may prove to be better predictors of the incidence of police violence than are structural-level characteristics in cross-city comparisons.

Originality/value – This analysis builds on structural-level racial threat theories by demonstrating that meso-level characteristics of cities are central to explaining disparities in the use of police violence. A multilevel approach to studying police violence using this analytic framework is proposed.

Violence as a foundational element of police work is continuously reaffirmed and justified through police labour as ‘violence workers’ (Seigel, 2018). Hiring more female police officers has recently been seen as a way to reduce police violence. However, would employing more female officers change the relationship between policing and violence? Arguments in favour of more female police tend to rely on stereotypical understandings of gender, emphasising that women are naturally less aggressive and more likely to be caring and compassionate, often obscuring the violence enacted by female police officers in doing so. Female officers may be more likely to engage in violence out of necessity due to police culture and occupational norms around the use of force. Examining female police across countries such as the United States, Nigeria and Slovenia, this chapter establishes female police violence as a broader pattern, reflects on how female officers participate in police violence and addresses the extent to which masculinised police culture structures the expression of police violence. This chapter concludes with a discussion of why hiring more female police officers is not an adequate solution for reducing police violence, as police officers enact and are complicit in violence, regardless of gender.

Doxing refers to the intentional public release by a third party of personal data without consent, often with the intent to humiliate, intimidate, harass, or punish the individual concerned. Intuitively, it is tempting to condemn doxing as a crude form of cyber violence that weaponizes personal data. When it is used as a strategy of resistance by the powerless to hold the powerful accountable, however, a more nuanced understanding is called for. This chapter focuses on the doxing phenomenon in Hong Kong, where doxing incidents against police officers and their family members have skyrocketed since 2019 (a 75-fold increase over 2018). It contends that doxing for political purposes is closely related to digital vigilantism, signifying a loss of confidence in the ruling authority and a yearning for an alternative form of justice. The chapter therefore argues that public interest should be recognized as a legal defense in doxing cases when those discharging or entrusted with public duty are the targets. Equally, it is important to confine the categories of personal data disclosed to information necessary to reveal the alleged wrongdoer or wrongdoing. Only in this way can a fair balance be struck between privacy, freedom of expression, and public interest.

Purpose – This chapter uses preventive and responsive policing strategies in tandem to develop a multi-level theory that explains the relationship between the police and violence.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter brings together classical scholarship and more recent sociological research to demonstrate that an effective response to violence is critical in upholding the state’s monopoly on violence and that police officers can reduce violence by preventing it and responding to it.

Findings – Theoretical and practical evidence support the balanced use of responsive and preventive policing strategies to reduce violence. Findings from the literature are used to argue that (1) when law enforcement officers do not effectively respond to violence and/or crime prevention strategies are nonexistent in a community, neighborhood crime is increased and (2) when citizens do not perceive law enforcement officers as legitimate and effective agents of authority, they become more likely to engage in violent offending (Tonry, 1995; Tyler, 2006).

Originality/value – Research has supported the effectiveness of “proactive” (Braga, Papachristos, & Hureau, 2014; Weisburd & Telep, 2014) and “reactive” (Nagin, 2013; Paternoster, 2010) policing strategies in reducing violence, but no research has combined strategies of prevention and response to explain the relationship between the police and violence. The theory proposed in this chapter demonstrates the utility of explaining the instrumental and legitimacy functions of the police across various levels and brings under-protection to the forefront of research on policing and violence.

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a global policy issue with significant social, economic and personal consequences. The burden of VAWGs is distributed unequally, with rates of gender violence significantly higher in low- to middle-income countries of the Global South. Yet the bulk of global research on gender violence is based on the experiences of urban communities in high-income English-speaking countries mainly from the Global North. This body of research typically takes the experience of women from Anglophone countries as the norm from which to theorise and frame theories and research of gender-based violence. This chapter problematises theories that the privilege women in the Global North as the empirical referents of ‘everyday violence’ (Carrington et al., 2016). At the same time, however, it is important to resist homogenising the violence experienced by women across diverse societies in the Global South as oppressed subaltern Southern. This binary discourse exaggerates the differences and obfuscates the similarities of VAWG across Northern and Southern borders and reproduces images of women in the Global South as unfortunate victims of ‘other’ cultures (Durham, 2015; Narayan, 1997). This chapter contrasts three examples, the policing of family violence in Indigenous communities in Australia; Image-based Abuse in Singapore; and the policing of gender violence in the Pacific as a way of concretising the argument.