Intensive Police Stops - A Comparison of Court Decisions and Empirical Practice

Abstract

Police stops regularly comprise a bundle of measures: identification, questioning/interrogation, database comparison, search and/or taking to the police station. There are strong divergences between the judicial facts of the case and our empirical observations of police practice: questionings/interrogations and database comparisons are not or hardly described. A sociological analysis of the processes involved in police stops reveals a number of possible (sometimes unintentional) stigmatizing, discriminatory and disruptive effects, which, from a legal perspective, can lead to a high intensity of intervention of the measures. In the judicial practice, however, these effects and the associated possible increase in the intensity of the intervention are not or hardly discussed, and regularly the courts assume a low intensity of intervention of the measures during a police stop. In this paper, the procedures during identity checks are examined sociologically, and it is deduced when and why the interventions are to be classified as intensive from a legal perspective.