High profile workshop - Berlin 2013

On the 13th till 15th of May 2013 an internal project workshop took place in the course of the European FP7 project COREPOL – Conflict Resolution, Mediation and Restorative Justice and the Policing of Ethnic Minorities in Germany, Austria and Hungary in Berlin, Germany. The workshop was hold in the Mercure Hotel in Berlin-Neukölln, one of three German City Quarters under investigation by COREPOL.

The project team pepares the fielstudy

The partners of the COREPOL summarised what progress had been going on since the last meeting. The COREPOL consortium as a whole thereby already revealed the under researched area of ethnical/racial profiling and abuse of police power in minority policing in the countries under study and report missing data to conduct further research through the field studies. We can state that missing data, ‘gaps’ and areas under research in many of the above mentioned topics have been unfolded as well, which have been highlighted in our study. We introduced the activities, results and difficulties what we had faced in the past six months. Moreover, we planned the field study of the research that is the next phase of the program. In the framework of a training that was facilitated by the Austrian partner, we talked over how we should prepare the interviews, what should focus on the interviewees and what kind of special characteristics has the target group.
Besides the methodological issues, a visit to Mr Buschkowsky, deputy mayor of the Neukölln district, the Berlin Police Headquarter and the project called ‘Madonna’ were additional items on the agenda. Joachim Kersten, professor of the German Police University (DHPOL) and coordinator of the COREPOL project led through the event.

COREPOL researchers are meeting policy makers at the townhall of Berlin Neukölln.

At the end of the meeting we looked over the administrative duties of the partners. Moreover, we agreed that the Austrian partners of the program will organize the “Analyses training” in Vienna. All in all, the meeting was successful and necessary in order to achieve our aims and coordinate the work of the partners.