Projects
There is no police violence in Bulgaria. This seems to be the consensus crafted by a wide and dispersed set of politicians, journalists, and even social media users. Yet, multiple lawsuits against Bulgaria were won at the European Human Rights Court; a psychologist from the Ministry of Interior admits on TV that the problem with police violence might be become systemic; and once in a few years, a scandal errupts because of alleged misuse of power on the part of police officers. While a handful of activists and NGOs try to keep tabs on police violence in the country, this remains an uphill battle since there is no official statistics and no accepted definition of key concepts such as “police violence” or “police harassment”. This project seeks to understand the meanings which a variety of stakeholders—journalists, victims, lawyers, and police officers—ascribe to “police violence” and what are the strategies through which these stakeholders make or unmake the category of “police violence” itself. To do so, the project employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including interviews, discourse and text analysis, and basic statistics.