Working group ‘Police’
The Local Police provides basic police care within the Belgian police system. Very concretely, this means that they are responsible for a solid neighborhood policing, a 24h front desk, an intervention or emergency assistance service, a service for treatment of victims, a local investigation, traffic and the maintenance of public order. At present, the local police have 185 local police zones spread over the Flemish, Walloon and Brussels regions. Because the police zones are organized at the level of the municipalities – depending on the organization of the police zone, which consists of one or more municipalities – they are close to the community and the citizens. In this sense, the local police are also in charge of a first-line police service and do so from a community-oriented policing point of view.
The aim of the “Police” working group is therefore to conceive and design organization-wide training and education initiatives around themes that appeal to and engage the local police. In doing so, we do not shy away from topics. We will work around themes that require an academic deepening, as well as policy issues and operational (daily) problems of the field are put on the map. The target audience is very diverse, i.e. across police grades and statutes: from policeman to chief of police, from administrative staff to uniformed police officer, from police personnel to those interested in the local police. In this sense, we hope that everyone who works in or is interested in local police work can be stimulated with new forms of learning and competence development, without abandoning the concept of the classic conferences.
Since the local police are in close contact with their community, we want to work closely with the (provincial) police schools, learning organizations embedded in a learning environment.
The Federal Police is the second pillar of the Belgian integrated police (Law of 7 December 1998 on the integrated police). The federal police provides the local police zones with specialized support for administrative, judicial and administrative tasks. For administrative tasks, the federal police provides support by means of border controls, road police, railroad police or maritime and aviation police. Federal judicial police departments carry out their own activities, mainly with a view to the fight against organized crime, and provide specialized support and assignments to the local police to help detect supra-local or more complex forms of crime. Finally, the federal police provides administrative and logistical support and represents the Belgian police services within the framework of international police cooperation.
With the “Police” working group, the CPS mainly wants to reach the different public actors, working in or concerned with “capacity building” in the broad scope of police operations and the care for integral security. Examples are the government, civil or private security, first responders, etc. In addition, persons active in education and persons conducting research in the fields of innovation, technology and security are also counted among the possible target groups.
Pilots
- Sofie De Kimpe, Professor Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- Jurgen De Landsheer, Chief of Police, Police Zone Brussels-South
- Arne Dormaels, Director Safety & Security, VIAS Institute
