You Can't Train Away Police Racism – Justice Means Jailtime, Not Seminars
24 April 2026
In February this year, a Romani couple won a European Court of Human Rights judgment against Serbia after they were detained for hours at a police station in Belgrade where officers tortured the husband, racially abused the wife, and threatened to have their children taken by social services. A month later, two Romani women won another European Court case against Slovakia after they were severely beaten, locked in a cupboard at a police station, and suffered a biased investigation which failed to hold the perpetrating officers responsible.
These incidents were not unusual occurrences with complicated legal elements that justified them having to go to the highest treaty court in Europe to get justice instead of being dealt with in domestic courts. They were not one-offs, or peculiar anomalies of an otherwise unflawed system.
Each of these cases are the predictable output of a racist criminal legal system; one that persecutes Roma and other racialised people at every stage of its corrupt operation. In such a system, law enforcement represents only the sharpest edge of a process that fails Romani people. It utilises biased investigative bodies, relies on public prosecutors who are hand-in-glove with local police forces, defence lawyers who sometimes fail to even turn up for Romani defendants, judiciaries that deliver no judicial justice, and carceral systems that are stuffed full of racialised inmates facing overly lengthy stretches of jailtime.
The problem is the law enforcement and criminal legal system itself. The root cause is institutional racism. Yet the response from governments and the EU is always according to the same script; one that many in Roma rights circles have long been guilty of parroting, that is: we need more implicit bias training, we need more diversity in the force, we need "cultural sensitivity" workshops, we need to hire more officers who look like the communities they police.
None of that works. This approach is not just insufficient; it is a distraction.
The false economy of reform
There is no compelling evidence that implicit bias training prevents ethnic profiling, or police techniques training prevents violent deaths. No seminar on "Roma culture" is going to stop a police force from ethnically profiling or beating Roma to death. Officers attend, sign the sheet, and return to their beats with the exact same patterns of violence. Why? Because the problem is not a lack of knowledge. It is a lack of consequence to their actions.
The other bright idea is that hiring more officers from minority backgrounds will solve systemic police racism. An institution built on controlling racialised people cannot be fixed by adding more brown faces to the uniform. If the power dynamics and the culture of impunity remain the same, a Romani officer is just as likely to follow orders to ethnically profile as a white one. In fact, it can make the violence harder to see, by creating an illusion of progress while the machinery of oppression remains intact. An example of this is the cynical manoeuvre of law enforcement and security agencies deliberately using officers from racialised backgrounds to police other racialised people. It uses apparent diversity to create a visual shield that defends the institution from attacks to the core systemic problem: its culture of racism.
Accountability means criminal sentences not administrative fines
The ERRC has spent three decades litigating police cases the length and breadth of Europe. Of the hundreds upon hundreds of cases of police brutality against Roma in our case docket, you could count on two hands the number of times a police officer in Europe has actually faced prison time for committing violently racist crimes.
The pattern is consistent: a Romani person is stopped, beaten, or killed; the police blame the victim; the investigation is conducted by the police themselves or prosecutors who are far too close to them. The result? Almost always, nothing. Maybe an administrative sanction. Maybe a civil settlement. But the officer? They keep their job, their pension, and face no jail time. Sometimes they are even lauded as heroes by politicians, such as the officer who murdered Stanislav Tomas under his knee on the street in Teplice, Czech Republic, or the officers who executed Nikos Sabanis with a hail of some 30 – 40 bullets in Perama, Greece.
An administrative sanction is not justice. It is a transaction. It tells the police that violence against Roma is just a cost of doing business. Simultaneously, it tells victims that their pain is worth a few thousand euros, but not enough to put someone behind bars.
It is useless to talk about "reform" in the abstract without demanding criminal accountability in real terms. Accountability would mean a European framework that mandates the prosecution of officers for excessive force. It would mean investigative bodies on police misconduct that are independent of the police or the Ministry of Interior. We’d need prosecutors who do not owe their careers to the police chiefs they are tasked with investigating. Finally, and most importantly, it would mean moving these cases out of civil courts, where the burden of proof is impossible for victims, and into criminal courts where the state must prove the officer's innocence, not the victim's guilt.
Against the tide, strategic litigation is our last defence
Everything written above might as well be a wish list. We are in a political moment that is increasingly hostile to fundamental rights as far-right parties move from the fringe to the centre of government, dragging the entire political spectrum with them to the right. Their platforms frame Roma not as citizens with rights, but as a threat to public order, a burden on the state, or a criminal element to be "managed." As punitive measures are re-spun as "law and order" at the expense of human rights, politicians are promising to crack down on crime, where "crime" is often code for "Roma" and other racialised groups.
In this climate, the role of the police shifts. As the sole legal wielders of state violence, they met out this violence according to the politics of the day. In the new context, the police are no longer protectors of the peace (if indeed they ever were) and instead become the enforcers of exclusionary politics.
The reality we must wake up to is a Europe where recently passed EU legislation is paving the way for a new era of policing that looks frighteningly like ICE in the United States. We are moving toward a merger of border control and interior policing, of the mandate expanding from managing borders to hunting down anyone deemed "irregular" anywhere on the continent. It is only a matter of time until those same tools being used to deport migrants, and anyone deemed migrant enough, will eventually be turned inward against our own communities as well.
We cannot wait for a cultural shift that may never happen, or for the police to magically develop a conscience. The only leverage we have is the law, applied with teeth. We must force the changes we need through strategic litigation. We must demand that when a Romani person is beaten, the officer who did it goes to jail. It is crazy that that is such a radical expectation from our criminal legal systems.
Justice is a prison cell for the perpetrator, not a training module or a diversity hire. Until we make that the standard, the cycle of impunity will continue regardless of who is wearing the badge, what their skin-color is, or how many training and cultural sensitivity workshops they have been on. It’s been the same call by the people against the police since policing began. Victor Hugo said it in 1851, and protesters chant it every week here in Brussels and beyond: “police partout, justice nulle part” [police everywhere, justice nowhere.] It is the same access to justice gap the ERRC have been ranting about for 30 years. We don’t need more evidence, or more data, or more best practices. We need police to simply face justice when they commit racist violent crimes and pay for those crimes by serving sentences handed down in a criminal court, the same as everyone else.
This article was adapted from a speech delivered in the European Parliament on 23rd April 2026 as part of the event “Safety and Justice Through a Roma Lens: Challenging Systemic Profiling and Rights Violations” as part of Roma Week 2026.
