Souplesse et méfiance de la coopération policière transnationale

In recent years, transnational police cooperation has been the subject of much attention, often with a prioritization on efficiency. However, relatively little information is available on the process itself. The main objective of the thesis is to formulate an analytical framework that integrates the concerns of political authorities and those of judicial and law-enforcement actors.  Past research has illustrated that such actors are all pivotal in the transnational police cooperation system. Yet, in spite of such findings, researchers have generally approached this setting without placing the consistent overlap and interactions between such actors at the forefront. This has left us with a separate set of studies on political actors and the decisions taken by them in regard to the development of concepts and the signing of agreements and studies on police and judicial actors that are more concerned with the daily conduct of transnational policing and what follows (i.e., court proceedings). Using concepts and terms such as discretion, flexibility, familiarity, (dis)trust, scepticism, and avoidance, this thesis proposes an integrative framework designed to rally more recent concepts of mutual recognition and mutual trust with what actually happens in real life police operations.  The study focuses primarily on transnational drug trafficking cases within the Canadian context and is based on two types of data. First, qualitative interviews were conducted with 21 police investigators and prosecutors. Next, a content analysis was performed on seven jurisprudences on transnational cases and a guide written by an attorney for investigators.  The most important results of the thesis are presented here. In the first chapter, two power structures that are in constant interaction are revealed. Such interaction illustrates that the lever of influence of state actors on transnational policing actors can be quite powerful, but facades can still be used by police officers in specific cases. This supports Nadelmann (1993), who argued that a standard adopted at the transnational level is not necessarily helpful to achieve the common goal of states, which is to contain and immobilize offenders. The norm is the product of political negotiations and an ongoing power struggle, which, in the end, does not have a strong influence on the decisions taken by the police in transnational investigations. At best, formal agreements between states serve as an impunity guide for police actors on what not to violate openly. Furthermore, as countries and organizations use a system of rewards, incentives or threats of sanctions to promote cooperation in transnational policing, individuals working in transnational investigations uses familiarity and trust as a means to establish and maintain relationships. These individuals cannot bind themselves. On the contrary, there is the possibility to impose real sanctions between state actors. This problem is approached with two levels of analysis that reveal different relational patterns.   In the second chapter of analysis, Canadian jurisprudence and a prosecutorial guide that was written for investigators are examined. These documents demonstrate the discretion left by judicial actors on those working in transnational police investigations. In fact, we found that judicial actors are well aware of the difficulties related to transnational investigations. They are more flexible in those cases than in national investigations.   The third chapter pursues such discretion and highlights the many paths available to police actors involved in transnational cooperation. In particular, it is the management of uncertainty, the nature of information and its intended use that are important to them.   Finally, the last chapter of analysis assesses the different types of relationships maintained between actors in transnational investigations. We found that, while scepticism overrides most relationships, cooperation continues as often as possible, at least when actors have interests in common. A level of familiarity between actors is necessary, but trust is not always essential to achieve transnational policing. In fact, it depends on the requested level of exchanges and in the context and is consistent with previous work by Gambetta (1988), who shows that even in a generalized context of distrust, a relatively stable social structure can maintain itself.

Keyphrases: collaboration, trafic de drogue transnational, Repression, police discretion, transnational policing, cooperation, collaboration, transnational drug trafficking, risk management, mutual trust