Dresden, Germany, June 2018 – Efus and some 3,000 participants – elected officials, politicians, practitioners from national, regional and local authorities, representatives of civil society and the private sector, researchers and journalists – attended the 23rd German Congress on Crime Prevention (GCCOP), which was hosted on 11-12 June by the city of Dresden, the federal state of Saxony and the Crime Prevention Council of Saxony.
The overall theme of the event, the largest annual conference on crime prevention in Germany, was “Violence and Radicalism – Current Challenges for Prevention”. With a very rich programme and dozens of speakers, it featured 110 lecture presentations, 44 project spots, and 150 info booths.
The GCCOP has been an associate member of Efus since 2009, and the two organisations have worked in close partnership ever since.
Efus was present at the conference with an info-booth, which it co-hosted with the German Forum, DEFUS. They were represented by Efus Project Managers, Pilar de la Torre and Moritz Konradi, and DEFUS Executive Director, Anna Rau.
Efus presents the JUST and Medi@4sec projects
This year, Efus contributed to the conference programme by presenting its work on radicalisation as well as the results of two European projects: Just and Safer Cities for All (JUST), on the prevention of discrimination, and Medi@4Sec, which is still underway and deals with the use of social media in crime prevention.
Led by Efus between 2015 and 2017, Just and Safer Cities for All has reviewed strategies and developed recommendations on how to prevent and counter discriminatory violence and hate crime at the local level. It has produced practical guidance and established a network of cities and regions engaged in this effort.
The project Medi@4Sec (2016-2018), led by University of Warwick (GB) and supported by Efus as a partner, aims to understand the opportunities, challenges and ethical considerations of the use of social media for public security purposes. It seeks to better match technical solutions with the needs of security practitioners at the local and regional level.
International PVE-Conference
Furthermore, Efus will co-host the International PVE-Conference with GCCOP, the German National Centre for Crime Prevention (Nationales Zentrum Kriminalprävention, NZK) and the German international cooperation agency GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit), on 8-9 November 2018, in Frankfurt. This conference aims to organise an exchange on state-of-the-art strategies to prevent radicalisation and violent extremism and to effectively reduce the threat of terrorism and political violence, offering policy makers, researchers and practitioners a space to discuss local, regional, national and international solutions and challenges.
————-
Further information
A special report on the topic of the prevention of radicalisation was prepared for the German Congress by Prof. Dr. Dirk Baier, of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.
It is available here (in English).
