Cyberattacks on European ports have increased recently, especially since the war in Ukraine. Public and political concerns exist about ports becoming victimized by state-sponsored cyberattacks. As ports depend heavily on interconnected technology, attacking a single port facility damages the entire port sector and other connecting sectors. Cybersecurity literature acknowledges that these attacks are often a result of human behaviour, making humans the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. Specific knowledge on how human behaviour and cognitive constraints relate to (awareness of) cyberattacks on ports remains undeveloped. This article therefore considers the status quo of cyberthreat awareness within the Port of Rotterdam and North Sea Canal Area/Port of Amsterdam as important European gateways to discover how awareness of cyberthreats and attacks relates to ports’ cyber-resilience. Interviewed (port) security experts and employees argued the lack of cyberthreat awareness is caused by 1) rapid technological developments in a traditional sector, 2) cybersecurity versus economic interests and 3) inactive partnerships.

Drawing on her ethnographic doctoral research, the author reflects on the challenges of employing a feminist methodology when observing the police. The article will discuss the fraught process of gaining trust and sustaining fragile access by betraying the self. The feminist killjoy (Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life; Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook) is used as a lens to examine the author’s response to the political and ethical dilemmas that she encountered during fieldwork. This will lead to considering whether a “critical empathy” framework is a valuable approach to conducting police research from a feminist perspective. This discussion will offer new tools for dealing with the emotional complexities of ethnographic research. It will make a strong case for the possibilities and importance of conducting feminist research about the police.

How, and in what ways, can design practice contribute to observational research on policing? This article outlines the potential for design research methods, and more specifically, “design Things”, to be used in ethnographic policing research. The article outlines some of design practices’ unique epistemic qualities, describes what design Things are and suggests they might relate to ethnographic policing research. Reflecting on doctoral research into police use of body-worn video cameras, the article discusses how design Things have successfully been used to introduce specific questions, matters of concern and elicit speculations from research participants. As well as highlighting the possibilities of this novel methodology for policing research, the challenges and ethical considerations are also considered.

The purpose of this study was to explore whether hardiness and Big Five personality trait levels of students would change during the Norwegian bachelor programme in policing. The police students (n = 57) were assessed with the measures of BFI-20 and DRS-15-R at the beginning (Time 1) and on completion of their training (Time 2), as were a comparison group of psychology bachelor students (n = 40). The results revealed some differences in the scores between the study groups, where the most significant finding was that police students reported higher mean levels of the emotional stability personality trait compared with psychology students. Moreover, whereas the police students reported several mean-level changes when comparing the personality trait and hardiness scores obtained at the beginning and end of the study programme, such changes were not witnessed by the psychology students. Lastly, the findings revealed that the scores on the personality traits of agreeableness and emotional stability underwent significantly different change patterns when comparing the student groups. Police and psychology students reported opposing changes on these traits, respectively, a decrease and an increase. We conclude that the bachelor programme in policing seems to influence the student’s personality characteristics.