Large Protest Events and International Police Cooperation

Over the past decades, cooperation among police agencies has become the standard in Europe and beyond in the preparation of large sports events such as European and World football championships. Police agencies exchange information about supporters who plan to travel to such events and especially about those suspected to have been involved in violence before. They exchange experts who know the travelling fans in order to give advice to the police agency in the country where the event takes place. In some cases they also have the task order to communicate with potentially violent fans in order to make them understand that they are monitored by the police even abroad. This kind of cooperation has been openly promoted by the police since the early 2000s, and it has also been triggered and supported by European law. In the paper that I propose for the panel, I ask to what extent such cooperation exists for large scale trans-border political protest events and how much it differs from the cooperation established for sports events. The fact that agencies cooperate (at least within the EU) for the policing of political protest events is largely known. However, the practices, the strategies applied, and the difficulties that may occur in this context are much less overtly promoted by the agencies. One explanation is related to the divergent police services and security agencies involved in the two types of events. For political protest policing, intelligence services and police services specialised in politically motivated crimes play an important role, which makes this kind of police cooperation much less transparent and less accountable, compared to the transnational policing of sports events. The paper explores the methodological challenges and the biases this lack of transparency may lead to for the research into large protest events.