Policing the Crisis: The other side of the story
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Speaker
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Dr Rosa Vasilaki
National Bank of Greece Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Hellenic Observatory, LSE
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Chair
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Dr Rebecca Bryant
A.N. Hadjiyiannis Senior Research Fellow
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Date
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Tuesday, 3 March 2015
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Venue
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Cañada Blanch Room, COW 1.11, 1st floor, Cowdray House
European Institute, LSE
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Time
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18:00-19:30
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Twitter
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# LSEvasilaki
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Abstract
Since 2010 Greece undergoes a period of intense and rapid economic and political transformation – a generalised crisis - as a result of austerity measures, privatization and the dismantling of the Welfare State. The police as an institution is no exception to this crisis, but what is particularly interesting is the role that the police as a State apparatus is required and expected to play in situations of generalised discontent, often resulting in open dissent or even clash between the citizens and the State/government. Because of historical, political and cultural reasons, the Greek police as an institution with its own culture and values has not been yet the object of sociological analysis, except for the cases where police misconduct, violence or transgression is in question. These historical and cultural parameters have been further accentuated in recent years: the economic crisis and the social turmoil it generated have been translated into a proliferation of protests, which often have taken the police as their target. The retreat of the Welfare State and the determination of the government to push the largely unpopular reforms agenda have turned the police into the most visible representative of the State. The turn of a part of the police force to the far right– which has been highly mediatised to the point of resembling to a moral panic – along with the belated reaction of the government to the criminal activities of the far right, has further exacerbated the stereotyping of police as harbouring sympathy for undemocratic, authoritarian political formations.
As the Greek society and its institutions undergo perhaps their most significant transformation in forty years, and as the sociological gaze has been focused mainly on the protesters and the manifestations of resistance, this paper shifts the emphasis to the experience of policing the crisis and its violent aspects, and to the views and perceptions of police officers vis-à-vis their role and their relationship with the protesting public. Using ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with police officers working in front line services dealing with the tangible manifestations of the crisis, this papers aims to shed light to a peculiarly isolated social group and its experience of the paradox of power, as well as to look at the ways police are tasked to enforce an unequal social order in the name of public security.
We are grateful to the National Bank of Greece for funding this research project.
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