TY - JOUR AB - In August 2009, an adolescent supermarket burglar was fatally shot in the town of Krems an der Donau in Lower Austria by a police officer using a police firearm. The case has prompted heated public debate about the background, processes and consequences of adolescent and police action, and raises questions including what constitutes right police action, and how the public reacts to (specific) police action. Simone Jungwirth has addressed the case in question in a dissertation written at the University of Vienna's Department of Sociology titled "Homicide of an adolescent supermarket burglar – the Krems Merkur case". She looks into (specific) police action and public reactions to it by carrying out a qualitative-explorative study, which is a suitable method for examining "real-life events" such as the Krems Merkur case. She comes to the conclusion that police action per se cannot be right or wrong, and that there is no one public reaction to the Krems Merkur case. A uniform public reaction to other cases of police action is also unlikely, since the public is made up of stakeholder groups that have different expectations and opinions of the police. The definition of right police action is always dependent on the given situation and the stakeholder groups concerned. Their requirements overlap, however, in the "core area of appropriate police action". The term "appropriate" is used instead of "right" because police action is solution-oriented and is based on the police officer's mental representation of the given problem. That solution can be described as appropriate to a greater or lesser degree, but never as right or wrong. AU - Jungwirth, Simone DO - 10.7396/IE_2016_C ET - 9/2016 KW - Krems Merkur case police action homicide LA - eng M1 - International Edition PY - 2016 SN - 1813-3495 SP - 30-39 ST - Homicide of an Adolescent Burglar by a Police Officer. Right and wrong police action, public reactions and possible consequences of the “Krems Merkur” case T2 - SIAK-Journal − Journal for Police Science and Practice TI - Homicide of an Adolescent Burglar by a Police Officer. Right and wrong police action, public reactions and possible consequences of the “Krems Merkur” case UR - http://www.bmi.gv.at/cms/BMI_SIAK/4/2/1/ie2016/files/Jungwirth_IE_2016.pdf VL - 6 ID - 558 ER -