The Phd Defence of José María López-Riba will take place next 22nd of March 2019. The thesis is entitled "Las identificaciones policiales en España: un análisis crítico desde la criminología" [ID checks in Spain: a critical review from criminology]. The thesis has been supervised by Elena Larrauri (UPF). The committee will be formed by Margarita Martínez Escamilla (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Jorge Rodríguez Menés (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Ben Bradford (University College London). The defence is public and will take place at 12 am at Sala de Graus Calsamiglia (40.035. Roger de Llúria building). Here you can find more information.

The abstract of the thesis is the following:

"The main objective of this thesis is to study the power of the police to conduct identity checks from a criminological perspective. For this purpose, an examination is made of the legislation; a review of national and international criminological research to expose the issues that this literature has highlighted; and an analysis of the official police data to see their demographic and geographic distribution, their preventive effectiveness and the extension of their use. The main findings of this work are: they are used extensively in Spain comparing with other contexts; the regulation gives the police a broad space of discretion to conduct them; there are limited procedures to monitor how they are being carried out in the practice, apart from the formal ones that have been established in the law. All of that despite: it does not seem that the use of this power is meeting the legal objectives; they are concentrated in certain groups; their current practice has negative consequences both for the police themselves, the loss of trust and legitimacy, and for the people identified, they can mean the beginning of labeling and social exclusion or the reinforcement of these processes."