SEBASTIAN ROCHÉ

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).