On 14 January 2022, the “Good Practices on Improving Relations Between Police Representatives and the Roma Communities” webinar took place, within the joint EU/Council of Europe programme JUSTROM3.
The webinar enabled participants to get knowledge of ways to introduce community policing at municipal level and share good practices to improve relations between police representatives and Roma communities. The event was attended by 55 participants, namely representatives of NGOs, municipalities, police and JUSTROM3 collaborators.
The Council of Europe Intercultural Cities community policing model based on the experience of the city of Fuenlabrada was presented during the webinar. Good practices applied by the city of Fuenlabrada, Spain, such as the Anti-Rumours methodology and the Manual on community policing were also shared with the participants. Further, the participants learnt about the community policing work of the Municipal Police of Lisbon, Portugal.
The webinar also addressed the inter-governmental work that is being carried out by the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe/Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in the area of improving relations between police representatives and the Roma communities. The Council of Europe developed the toolkit for police officers “Council of Europe standards on racially motivated crimes and non-discrimination with a focus on Roma and Travellers” and is offering training expertise to the member States. The result of the co-operation among the two inter-governmental organisations, based on their shared objectives, was the common curricula “Police and Roma – Effective and Human Rights Compliant Policing”, which will also be used for training courses for police officers.
Collaborators of JUSTROM3 shared with the participants their experience of work with the police representatives, for improving the access of Roma women to justice.