Research project SO/02/015 (Research action SO)
The project covers a period of 2 years. It began in February 2001 and will be completed in February 2003. The study is being financed by the Federal Office for Scientific, Technical and Cultural Affairs (OSTC) and forms part of the multi-year research programme on contemporary problems of social cohesion.
Unlike the regular police services, special inspection services focus on a specific branch of the special criminal law. These ´special´ laws were (and still are) subsumed under what is generally indicated with the umbrella term ´special criminal law´. The variety of these laws is enormous, and has expanded greatly in recent decades. It encompasses (inter alia) social criminal law, economic criminal law, environmental criminal law, fiscal criminal law, health criminal law, and so on. Besides the general police services, various persons, services or administrations are declared competent for the enforcement of these special laws. We indicate this group of special enforcers with the term ´special inspection services´.
Until now, scientific research on the special inspection services has primarily focused on studying the legislation, powers, historical backgrounds and functioning of the services. Less familiar and studied are the activities which these services engage in the field, and more specifically those which are set down in reports. The reports of regular police services, by contrast, have been centralised for years by the APSD in the GICS statistics.
The scientific contribution of this research consists in filling the above-mentioned lacuna by acquiring insight into the criminal-law activities of the special inspection services. This will firstly be achieved via quantitative research, and more specifically, by analysing reports which have been drawn up by the special inspection services. The data with regard to the reports are collected at the level of the public prosecutor's offices (request for reports in three public prosecutor's offices). Concretely, by means of statistical analyses, we will attempt to arrive at a clearer picture of the following issues : Which special inspection services actually prepare reports and submit them to the public prosecutor's office? How many reports are involved on an annual basis, and what follow-up is given to them? What facts does one find in these reports? To what extent are special inspection services and regular police services active within the same criminal-law subject areas? This information can offer valuable indications when considering whether these police powers must be retained and how one might possibly reorient/reorganise these services from a criminal-law and/or administrative-law perspective.
However, inspection services do not only act via reports. They often have many administrative possibilities for dealing with a given case. A one-sided analysis of their report production could lead to a misconception of their activities. The results of the quantitative analysis will therefore be supplemented by insights obtained from a qualitative part, which will consist of a number of in-depth interviews with inspectors in the involved services themselves. This qualitative phase has a twofold objective: firstly, we wish to gain an understanding of the alternative handling methods used by these services ("diversion"), and secondly we also wish to lay bare the actual functioning, both internal and external, of the services themselves.
Two final objectives are postulated in the research. Firstly, the development of an instrumental aid for possible reorganisation of the special inspection services. And secondly, we will experimentally verify how the regular crime statistics can be supplemented by reports coming from these services.
Bijzondere inspectiediensten : empirisch onderzoek naar hun verbaliseringsgedrag : eindrapport
Ponsaers, Paul - De Keulenaer, Saaske - Vanhaverbeke, Wouter Gent : Academia Press, 2003 (PB6002)
Services spéciaux d'inspection: étude empirique sur leurs habitudes en matière de verbalisation : résumé
Bruxelles : SSTC, 2003 (SP1123)
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Bijzondere Inspectiediensten: empirisch onderzoek naar hun verbaliseringsgedrag : samenvatting
Brussel : DWTC, 2003 (SP1124)
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Special inspection services: empirical survey of their reporting behaviour : summary
Brussels : OSTC, 2003 (SP1125)
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