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Ce chapitre se propose de restituer une réflexion sur la dialectique entre personnes et libertés, àla lumière de quelques tendances lourdes qui, à compter du tournant du XXIème siècle, connotent fortement le traitement de la criminalité dans nos sociétés occidentales. Ces tendances donnent à lire la sécurité, désormais élargie à une absence de menaces à l’encontre des personnes et leurs biens, sous l’angle d’une société du risque, de l’insécurité et de la surveillance qui convergent vers l’émergence d’une société de l’exclusion et qui placent les personnes et leurs libertés sous tensions. Abstract: This chapter provides a reflection on the dialectic between peoples and freedoms in the light of some of the major trends dealing with crime and its control since the beginning of the XXI century in western societies. These trends reveal major issues regarding security – understood as a lack of threats to individuals and their goods – under a notion of risk, uncertainty and surveillance, which converge towards a society that ends up with people being put aside and their liberties being jeopardised.

La mission d’aide à la décision judiciaire confiée aux psychiatres a connu de profonds bouleversements ces dernières années en Suisse. Alors que leur était traditionnellement dévolu la tâche d’évaluer la responsabilité pénale du sujet soumis à leur expertise, ils doivent depuis 2007 aussi évaluer les risques potentiels qu’il représente. Cet article rend compte de l’évolution progressive d’une évaluation du risque fondée sur les savoirs psychiatriques vers un risque actuariel, issu de recherches criminologiques empiriques. Il envisage aussi quelle pourrait être sa suite, déjà éprouvée à l’étranger, à savoir un risque « augmenté », fondé sur les mégadonnées et les instruments issus de l’intelligence artificielle destinés à les exploiter. Si cette perspective est réputée prometteuse pour certains, elle n’est pas exempte d’enjeux juridiques, sociaux, éthiques et politiques.

Dear Policing readers, we present to you a very special issue of the journal exclusively written by scientists and practitioners from the School of Criminal Justice of Lausanne, known as the Ecole des sciences criminelles (ESC) in French. You will discover a diversity of contributions combining disciplines dedicated to the study of crimes: forensic science, focusing on physical and digital traces to reconstruct events, and criminology, interested in behaviours, actors and social reactions; both contributing to policing. Several keywords and concepts define the rapid evolution of our society, of the different harms that come upon it and the (re)actions to prevent them from happening. As guest co-editors of this special issue, we wanted to address them through an interdisciplinary problem-based approach, addressing an increasingly digitalised world, with which academic and police institutions have difficulty to keep pace. The need to improve empirical methods around both physical and massively generated digital traces is particularly highlighted. Confronted to a huge amount of existing data, the question of how to handle big data and privacy arises in policing. On the one hand, we strive to collect or use as much data as possible to detect, identify, analyse and solve crime problems. On the other hand, the relevant information is often hidden in the mass. Thus, the general idea should not be to collect more data, but to find the reliable and relevant data to extract useful information. Case studies are discussed to illustrate how police investigation and management can combine physical and digital traces to improve the detection, resolution and prevention of (cyber)crime phenomena. Data and traces are not the sole core object of study that can bind forensic science and criminology to foster policing. Identities and generalised human traceability also play a critical role to reconstruct criminal behaviours. In forensic science, identity-related information are used to link suspects and objects to criminal activities and guide the investigative and judiciary process to find and sentence authors. In criminology, criminal behaviours are also scrutinised to infer offender profiles, modus operandi and trajectories. Such information, increasingly digital as well, serves many different purposes such as identification, localisation, reconstruction, case-linking, or even crime prevention. Several contributions also discuss the importance of cross-fertilization between research, education and practice both from an academic and policing point of view. While routine responses of police services to problems have to be very quick, academic research can slow the pace to gain an overview of the situations and propose global solutions based on intelligence and crime analysis. This special issue illustrates that it is impossible to address and solve real-life problems such as crime without collaboration. Indeed, crime-related problems are interdisciplinary in nature and the current global digitalisation transformation has profound impacts on crime, criminals and social reactions. The scale of change involves rethinking approaches to jointly manage mass data. This is a key venture to reframe and join disciplines within a critical-thinking approach. Current societal evolution undeniably requires to fasten policing, forensic science and criminology for more than their own sake.

Cet article s’intéresse, dans un contexte de démocratisation de la culture du cannabis en Suisse, aux principaux facteurs qui influencent le passage de la simple consommation de cannabis à son auto-production. Il se base sur un échantillon de 1032 consommateurs simples de cannabis et de 118 auto-producteurs. Les résultats montrent que les auto-producteurs sont plus âgés et socialement mieux intégrés que ne le sont les consommateurs. Leur usage de cannabis est plus conséquent et leurs modes de consommation plus diversifiés. Il apparaît également que les auto-producteurs plébiscitent la libéralisation du cannabis considèrent que sa consommation présente nettement moins de danger pour la santé que celle de l’alcool.

This paper presents the methodological process and the main findings of a research on crime displacement between two cantons (states) of Switzerland from 2009 to 2012. Two analytical axes have been considered: displacement of crime incidents on the one hand, and displacement of offenders for offences against the Swiss Criminal Code, on the other hand. Data were provided by police statistics of the two cantons involved and by a regional crime intelligence database, supplemented by documentary analysis, interviews and field observations. Measures of crime displacement were realized with variation in crime rates, difference-in-differences estimation and weighted displacement quotient applied to a selection of offences. Findings suggest the presence of a regional crime displacement of burglary, pickpocketing, simple theft and break-in theft in vehicle between 2011 and 2012. Displacement of offenders seems to follow this trend as well and highlights a small proportion of inter-regional offenders, but who are extremely prolific. These results and the study of displacement in general shed light on the effect of crime reduction strategies and provide many prospective pathways, such as the strengthening of inter-regional collaborations between the police forces in a federal State, and the systematic use of crime intelligence to reduce mobile criminal activities.

Cette recherche s’inscrit dans le cadre de la refonte de la politique pénitentiaire helvétique, laquelle a été entamée depuis plusieurs décennies et considère la peine privative de liberté en tant qu’ultima ratio. De fait, les frontières de l’institution carcérale sont en cours de redéfinition, ses finalités repensées, son agencement et son organisation réexaminés. La révision du Code pénal suisse témoigne de cette évolution : elle évince la peine privative de liberté du coeur du système des sanctions. Pour les délinquants qui n’échappent toutefois pas à la prison, elle préconise une prise en charge individualisée, adaptée à leur personnalité et suscitant leur « participation active ». De nouveaux concepts de prise en charge des détenus sont ainsi prévus, dont plusieurs laissent supposer que des protocoles de collaboration entre les différents professionnels chargés de leur encadrement devront être mis en oeuvre. Or, au coeur des relations entre ces intervenants se niche souvent une obligation de confidentialité dictée par la loi, susceptible précisément de brouiller le jeu des coopérations et d’engendrer des différends. S’il n’est pas aisé de déceler les limites entre l’obligation de se taire et le besoin de savoir des professionnels exerçant en société libre, il est plus complexe encore de les déterminer dans un milieu fermé, au sein duquel les rapports de force sont nombreux, la hiérarchie stricte et l’équilibre entre détenus et détenants toujours précaire. Aussi l’objectif de ce travail consiste-t-il en la proposition d’un modèle réglementé de partage, entre les différents intervenants investis de la prise en charge d’un détenu, des informations confidentielles le concernant. This work is placed within the framework of the revision of the Swiss penitentiary policy, which started several decades ago. If imprisonment should only be considered as a last resort, the outlines of prison must then be redefined, as well as its structure and organization. The revision of the Swiss Criminal Code testifies this evolution. It eliminates incarceration in the core of the criminal sanctions system. For those who could not escape from it, it recommends an individualized treatment, targeted at the personality of the convict and encouraging his « active participation ». To reach this goal, measures enabling a real dialogue between correctional and professional staff members must be implemented. However, the relationships between the various actors - particularly between the wardens and the medical staff - are very often biased because of implicit or formal secrecy. How then can tensions resulting from withholding such information be reduced in a situation already highly affected with conflictual relations? Whilst one cannot easily define where the secret belongs in the “free” society, it appears even more difficult to determine its place in a corrective institution, where power struggles are omnipresent, hierarchy strongly defined and where observers and observees are constantly attempting to balance their acts. As such, the objective of this work consists in developing a framework enabling the exchange of confidential information between the various actors involved in the treatment of offenders and entrusted with a secret protected by law, either because of their position or their profession.