Keio Research Institute at SFC

Objectives

Public safety policy and police studies covers a wide range of areas that goes beyond conventional criminal justice and criminology. Specifically, this study covers policies, etc. in fields that have an ambiguous boundary with security such as cyber security, intelligence, anti-terrorism policies, and administrative responses to events that don’t always become criminal cases such as child abuse, stalking, domestic violence, in addition to overall policies regarding crime prevention. We explore the effective and efficient policies while considering various factors including the balance against freedom and human rights, standards for international countermeasures, and financial constraints.

Accordingly, from the standpoint of academia, this laboratory aims to not only simply follow social safety policies implemented by the government, local public organizations, and private actors, etc., but also examine these policies and their relationships with freedom, human rights, and safety, from critical and multifaceted perspectives. This laboratory also aims to study systems that maintain social safety in our modern constitutional and democratic civil society, particularly the police organizations and authority which form the core of those systems, and give constructive proposals to policy-makers and accumulate study results in relevant fields where academic research has not necessarily been sufficient.

Outline of Research Activity Plan

A session commemorating the establishment of the Public Safety Policy and Police Studies Laboratory will be held during the SFC Open Research Forum to widely publicize the establishment of the laboratory to academia and the business world. We plan to invite concerned personnel from potential collaboration partners in academia such as Nihon University’s College of Risk Management, Kyoto Sangyo University’s Institute for Criminal Justice, and Chuo University’s Faculty of Policy Studies. We also plan to invite researchers belonging to Public Safety Policy Education Study Group, the Association for the Study of Security Science (Chairperson: Professor Tsutsumi from Chuo University), and practitioners from the National Police Agency and the National Police Academy, etc.

In the future, we plan to collaborate with the organizations listed above and hold public symposiums, etc.

In cyber security-related fields, we plan to voluntarily carry out cybercrime prevention activities targeting school children and youth. Specifically, student groups will conduct information ethics classes for school children.

Researchers, managers and professors