6. A fair cop? Policing and social justice

This chapter examines fairness in policing with reference to issues of race and gender. It first defines the terms of debate—justice, fairness, discrimination—then considers individual, cultural, institutional, and structural theories and applies these to various aspects of policing. It considers the histories of police discrimination in relation to the policing of poverty, chattel slavery, racial segregation, colonialism, religious conflict, and ethnic minority communities, to understand their contemporary legacy. The chapter then examines spheres of police activity where allegations of unfairness and discrimination are particularly salient, including the response to women crime victims of rape and domestic violence, the use of ‘racial profiling’ in stop and search powers, and the use of deadly force. It examines the experiences of people from ethnic minorities, women, gay men, and lesbians within police forces. Through an exploration of the historical and contemporary literature, the chapter draws conclusions on whether or not the police act fairly in democratic societies.

Thickening Borderlands

While Chapter 2 mainly refers to the lack of separation between roles and personalities, this chapter draws attention to the fading division between the Dutch police and its organizational environment. It argues that police power is now often divided across a multiplicity of organizations. This expanded notion of the police prompts us to look beyond the police organization, particularly when we want to understand an urgent matter such as police discrimination. The chapter engages with the literature on the ‘policing of migration’, as it is mainly in this field that diffuse, or networked policing has quickly advanced. Second, it provides detailed empirical data on how migrants experience borders within the nation-state due to a thickening of borderlands.

Migrant-Hostile Policing

This chapter opens with three arrest cases that shed light on the non-modular constitution of present-day policing. Modularity is here understood as the segmentation of social life into separate and relatively independent spheres. The three vignettes show what happens when policing becomes non-modular: private and public considerations are blurred in the operations that police officers undertake. The rest of the chapter adds ethnographic materials collected in various settings to argue that this organizational development turns racial profiling, and migrant-hostile policing more broadly, into an everyday affair. One conclusion is emphasized repeatedly: police discrimination is a public issue that concerns the entire organization rather than an outcome of the private troubles of the individuals it employs.

Police Unlimited

Police Unlimited is centred on a controversial idea that it supports with detailed ethnographic materials: police forces are a focal point of conflict in modern societies. Instead of a consensus model of law enforcement that understands the function of policing as socially integrative, it links to a conflict model concerned with the socially divisive effects of policing. Throughout the book, these effects and their causes are discussed on a national and global level. An ethnographic study was carried out at the Dutch police to enhance our understanding of police discrimination. Concerned with both internal and external affairs, the book addresses conflict cases within and outside the police station, covering both inter-ethnic tensions at work and the migrant hostility observed while joining officers on patrol. The cases are discussed in light of the corroding public character of Dutch policing and the risks involved in terms of discrimination and the arbitrary, or even privatized use of power. Signalling an increased blur of the private and public spheres in policing, the book warns about an ‘unlimited’ police force that is no longer constrained by the public contours that delineate a legal bureaucracy. For the sake of ethnological knowledge production that ultimately serves to develop a police anthropology, the ethnographic materials are consistently compared with other police ethnographies in the ‘global north’ and ‘global south’. This comparative analysis points out that the demise of bureaucracy makes it increasingly difficult for police organizations across the globe to exclude politics, particularism, and populism from their operations.

Psycho-Technicians and Greedy Institutions

Chapter 4 focuses on police discrimination and ethnic boundaries within the police organization. A number of ethnographic cases are discussed that help to understand how biocracy—the inclusion of the whole person in the workplace—works as a holistic type of power that makes it almost impossible for officers with a migration background to combat discrimination. More specifically, the chapter approaches diversity management, personal development plans, and other psychological instruments as forms of ‘identity control’ that stretch the outer bounds of labour control. Linguistic anthropological methods are used to study how psychological discourses traverse the Dutch police and undergo metamorphosis when they move from production to consumption sites.