SEBASTIAN ROCHÉ

CNRS Senior researcher (CNRS)

Gouvernance

Contact details

Building : IEP

Office : 43

sebastian.roche@sciencespo-grenoble.fr

Website :

Laboratoire Pacte

Social networks :

https://sebastianjroche.bsky.social

Research topics

Police and democracy / State, public order, use of force / Youth, Republic and Nation.

Research projects

JusForce : Police lethal shooting : judicial procedures and structural characteristics of oversight systems at state level in Europe (suported by IERDJ - Ministry of Justice).
POLGOV : Comparative institutional analysis of police structures in Europe (part of a UNDP project).
ACPL : External oversight agencies at the local level in Europe (supported by the city of Paris)
POLDEM : The rise of democratic oversight of police in Europe. A mapping of police external oversight mechanisms in Europe and Canada (supported by the Defender of Rights).
EXCEPTIUS : Exceptional powers in time of Sars-CoV-2 crisis (supported by the University of Grenoble, MSH-Alpes, Sciences-Po Grenoble, University of Groeningen).

The JusForce project is divided into two parts: JusForceMacro (systems characteristics) and JusForceJudiciare (analysis of judicial data on fatal police shootings). How does the judicial system function when tested against the use of force by a public officer? Controlling the use of force by the police is one of the most thorny and recurring problems in Western countries. However, when it comes to cases of use of lethal force by police officers, their consideration by judicial institutions and the legal remedies available to citizens are not systematically analyzed, because there is no solid database. JusForce is carrying out 1) a collection of essential data in the files of fatal police shootings from a pre-established list of known fatal shootings (with a grid of variables developed with two professors of law, e.g. temporality of the decisions, acts and expert reports carried out, and the decisions of the trial magistrates if applicable). The reference period was chosen to be sufficiently long (1990 - 2022) to obtain a number of cases for statistical processing; 2) a collection of national data (by year) on fatal shootings in EU countries (open sources, requests to ministries, expert survey), on the characteristics of police controllers (external control , internal control, and judicial control) from secondary data and requests to the ministries concerned (Justice, Interior, others).

Teaching

European Governance Master, Sciences Po-UGA

Executive Master, Sciences Po-UGA

Curriculum vitae

Founding member and/or editor-in-chief (journal/books) :

Editor (Europe) of "Policing and Society", the leading European journal on policing

Founder (with Jenny Fleming, Southampton University) of "Comparative Policing", a book series with Routledge.

Publications

Police & Democracy

Sebastian Roché, Research Pr. at the CNRS, teaches at Sciences-Po Grenoble / Université de Grenoble-Alpes. He recently published "Shocks and policing" (Comparative Policing Review #2 - Policing and Society Vol. 35 2025, with Jenny Fleming), "La nation inachevée. La jeunesse face à l'école et la police" (Grasset, 2022), "De la police en démocratie" (Grasset, 2016), and"Police-citizen relations across the world. Comparing sources and contexts of trust and legitimacy" (with D. Oberwittler, Routledge, 2018). He is particularly interested in the legitimacy and comparative governance of the police, police-population relations, but also youth delinquency and political integration into the nation and the Republic. He has co-directed comparative projects (ANR ‘POLIS’ in France and Germany ‘Adolescents-police relations in multi-ethnic societies’), ANR ‘UPYC’ in 5 countries (‘Understanding and Preventing Youth Crime’). He leads the JusForce and ‘POLDEM’ projects on the regulation of European police forces by external supervisory authorities such as ombudsmen and human rights defenders and judicial oversight of police (in France and the EU).