Policing race, ethnicity and culture: Ethnographic perspectives across Europe

By Manchester University Press

How to deal with differences based on culture, ethnicity and race, has become a key issue of policing. This edited collected explores everyday, often mundane interactions between police officers and migrantised actors in European countries and asks how both sides deal with perceived differences. The contributions reflect that such differences are not just ‘out there’ but are being situationally (re-)produced in police-citizen encounters. By taking a comparative approach, the book develops a distinctly European perspective on these questions. The book contains 12 ethnographies from ten European countries, based on new and often innovative empirical research, two theoretical contributions, an introduction and a postface.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526165572

Book preview

Policing race, ethnicity and culture

Policing race, ethnicity and culture

Ethnographic perspectives across Europe

Edited by

Jan Beek, Thomas Bierschenk,

Annalena Kolloch and Bernd Meyer

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6558 9 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset

by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of figures and tables

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction:Policing differences: perspectives from Europe

Jan Beek, Thomas Bierschenk and Annalena Kolloch

Part I: Categorisations of difference in police work

1Police racism in France and Germany: occupational socialisation and institutional guidelines

Jérémie Gauthier and Jacques de Maillard

2Policing order: ethnicity in statistics and the functions of nationalism

Rebecca Pates

3Predictively policed: the Dutch CAS case and its forerunners

Paul Mutsaers and Tom van Nuenen

4The social construction of parallel society in Swedish police documents

Ida Nafstad

Part II: Doing differences in everyday policing

5Dirty Harry gone global? On globalising policing and punitive impotence

David Sausdal

6Instrumentalising racism in Russian policing: everyday interactions between police officers and migrants

Ekaterina Khodzhaeva

7Negotiating with ethnic diversity: perceptions and patterns in everyday police work in Germany

Nina Müller

8‘Do you understand? Yes, you understand.’: bureaucratic translations of difference during deportation talks in Switzerland

Lisa Marie Borrelli

Part III: Policing as translation

9Inclusive and non-inclusive modes of communication in multilingual operational police training

Annalena Kolloch and Bernd Meyer

10Talking with hands and feet: language differences and translation in German policing

Jan Beek and Marcel Müller

11The Portuguese police and colonial sedimentations: when language divides

Susana Durão

Part IV: Police officers and ethnographers

12Albanian culture and major crime: challenging culturalist assumptions among investigating UK police

Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers

13Approaching foreign milieus: experiences from a joint seminar with police trainees and anthropology students

Gisela Pauli Caldas and Thomas Widlok

Postface: Authorising race: on police reproduction of difference

Ian Loader

Index

Figures and tables

Figures

1.1Prevalence of checks initiated by police (boys only; N=3,460 for Germany, N=6,354 for France; Germany on the left, France on the right, for ‘National Origin’, ‘Turkish African’ and ‘Other’ groups). Survey by Jérémie Gauthier

2.1Six dimensions of inclusion. Illustration by Rebecca Pates

9.1Shift from coercive to moderate control type due to the use of a translation app (1). Anonymised screenshot of a video by Annalena Kolloch and Bernd Meyer

9.2Shift from coercive to moderate control type due to the use of a translation app (2). Anonymised screenshot of a video by Annalena Kolloch and Bernd Meyer

9.3Shift from coercive to moderate control type due to the use of a translation app (3). Anonymised screenshot of a video by Annalena Kolloch and Bernd Meyer

9.4Shift from coercive to moderate control type due to the use of a translation app (4). Anonymised screenshot of a video by Annalena Kolloch and Bernd Meyer

Tables

1.1Distribution of discretionary checks (based on appearance) (de Maillard et al., 2018).

2.1The code systems used within the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) to formally record ethnicity. Source: Bowsher (2007)

9.1Linguistic practices and modes of communication used in the observed trainings.

Contributors

Jan Beek is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and leads the research project ‘Police-translations – multilingualism and the everyday production of cultural difference’. His research has focused on policing, state bureaucracies, cybercrime, the anthropology of fraud, transregional connections and collaborative research methods. He authored the book Producing Stateness: Police Work in Ghana (Brill, 2016) and co-edited Police in Africa: The Street Level View (Hurst Publishers, 2017). Based on fieldwork in Ghana, Kenya, India, Niger and Germany, he has published in journals such as Africa, Ethnography, Journal of Modern African Studies and Social Anthropology.

Thomas Bierschenk is professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. He has studied development, politics and the state in the Middle East and Africa. In 2014, he co-edited States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies (Brill, 2014); recently he published, together with Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, ‘The anthropology of bureaucracy and public services’. In Encyclopedia of Public Administration (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, edited by Guy Peters and Ian Thyme. Oxford University Press, 2021). He is currently conducting research within the Mainz project on ‘Police-translations’ (see above).

Lisa Marie Borrelli works as an associate professor at the Institute of Social Work, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Switzerland. Her interests lie in deportation and migration studies, welfare policies and sociology of law. She has conducted extensive organisational, ethnographic research within several state institutions and migration enforcement agencies throughout Europe and has – among other achievements – published papers on organisational socialisation within border police forces and street-level bureaucrats’ coping and creating strategies in JEMS, Public Administration and the Journal of Borderlands Studies.

Jacques de Maillard is Professor of Political Science at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin and Director of the Cesdip (Centre for sociological research on law and penal institutions), an interdisciplinary research centre specialising in criminal justice issues. His interests mainly lie in the comparative study of policing in Western countries, stop and search politics, and the pluralisation of policing. He has recently published Policing in France (co-ed. with Wesley Skogan; Routledge, 2020) and Comparative policing (Routledge, 2022).

Susana Durão is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Security and Campus Experience (SVC) at UNICAMP/State University of Campinas, São Paulo. Her topics of interest include public/private security assemblages; police studies; policing work and labour relations; gender and racial relations in security. She has published several articles and books, including Caso Carrefour, Racismo e Segurança Privada (Carrefour Case, Racism and Private Security) (2nd ed, Unipalmares Editora, 2021); Esquadra de Polícia (Police Station) (Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, 2017).

Jérémie Gauthier is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Strasbourg, member of the research unit Lab for interdisciplinary cultural studies (LinCS) and associated researcher at the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin. His research deals with policing issues in Western countries. He has recently published Police. Questions sensibles (co-ed. with Fabien Jobard; Presses Universitaires de France, 2018).

Ekaterina Khodzhaeva defended her Candidate of Science degree (Russian equivalent of a PhD) in sociology at the Kazan State University in 2003. For several years her scientific interests were focused on various topics: cultural politics of regional media, youth religiosities and religious policies, ethnic communities, and police control over migration. She has worked at Western universitiese: the Center of East European Studies, Bremen University as the German Chancellor’s fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2009–10), and Davis Center at Harvard University as a Fulbright fellow (2012–13). Since 2013, as a researcher at the Institute for the Rule of Law (European University at Saint Petersburg), her studies have focused on the police, legal profession and court system in Russia.

Annalena Kolloch is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She is working on the DFG-funded project ‘Police-translations – multilingualism and the everyday production of cultural difference’. She did her PhD in cultural anthropology on judges and prosecutors and their struggle for judicial independence in Benin, West Africa, published as Faire la magistrature au Bénin. Careers, Self-images and Independence of the Beninese Judiciary (1894–2016) (Köppe, 2022). Her research interests focus on the judiciary, language mediation, stories on policing and police–citizen interactions.

Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He is currently working on a three-year project on place, insecurity and everyday life, which investigates how people living in one English town – Macclesfield – talk about and act towards the range of threats they regard as impinging upon their safety. Ian is Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice.

Bernd Meyer is a linguist by training and Professor of Intercultural Communication at Mainz University. His research interests include linguistic approaches to multilingual communication in public service institutions and, more specifically, community interpreting. Besides being one of the principal investigators in the project ‘Police-translations’, he is engaged in counselling and training for community interpreting projects all over Germany.

Marcel Müller is a police officer and holds a doctorate in anthropology from the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany. Prior to his doctoral studies, he obtained a BA degree in public administration from the Hessian College of Police and Public Administration, and a Master’s degree in criminology and police science from Ruhr University in Bochum. He has been deployed in various functions and different organisational units (e.g,. patrol service, street crime unit, prevention team, etc.) of the Hessian state police.

Nina Müller has a PhD in cultural anthropology. Between 2018 and 2021 she worked at the German Police University in the field of criminology and interdisciplinary crime prevention. From 2012 to 2018 she was a research associate with the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. Her research focuses on Nigeria’s informal and formal security architecture in the field of policing and police–citizen relations with a focus on migration in Germany.

Paul Mutsaers is working as an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, Radboud University (Nijmegen). His work on police profiling and legitimacy – published in books such as Police Unlimited (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Cultural Practices of Victimhood (Routledge, 2019) – is currently focused on algorithmic crime prediction systems, in collaboration with Radboud’s Interdisciplinary Hub for Security, Privacy and Data Governance (iHub). In addition, he is working on juvenile justice in ‘transnational Curaçao’ with a specific focus on the postcolonial effects of juvenile crime prediction in the Caribbean.

Ida Nafstad is an associate professor in the Sociology of Law Department, Lund University. Her main research interest is law and marginalisation – the exclusion of marginalised groups of the populations as it relates to criminal law and criminal policy, and the response to this exclusion by means of integrating mechanisms and informal legal orders, field-specific norms and social control.

Rebecca Pates is Professor in Political Science at Leipzig University, specialising in identity politics and representation, nationalism and discourse analysis. She was elected to the Academia Europeae in 2019. Her most recent book is The Wolves are Coming Back (Manchester University Press, 2021), on the politics of fear in Eastern Germany, co-authored with Julia Leser and emerging from their research project on German nationalism. More information on the project results are found here: www.politische-laboratorien.de

Gisela Pauli Caldas is a professor at the University of Applied Sciences of Police and Public Administration in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. She studied Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and finished her PhD at the University of St Andrews, writing a first ethnography on a very small group of indigenous peoples in Lowland Amazonia. In the last ten years she has worked on the applicability of anthropological methodology and approaches to social realities ‘on the doorstep’. Her research focuses on questions of transculturality, ethics of public service, social competencies and methods of empirical research within the public administration and police.

David Sausdal is an associate senior lecturer at Lund University’s Department of Sociology with an interdisciplinary background in anthropology and criminology. His more recent research focuses on issues of transnational policing in and around Europe – issues primarily studied using an ethnographic approach. He has published on a range of topics, including questions of police nostalgia, violence, xenophobia, surveillance, warfarism and counter-terrorism, as well as writings on the potentials of ethnography in an increasingly globalised world of crime and policing.

Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, Associate Professor in Applied Anthropology at Bournemouth University (BU), has a long trajectory of ethnographic research in and about post-socialist Albania, post-conflict Kosovo and Albanian transnationalism. From 2003 to 2013 she ran an international academic consultancy company, providing specialist cultural expertise to national and international agencies based on this background (e.g. OSCE, World Bank, NATO, IOM, ICTY, UK government, immigration courts, the Metropolitan Police, social services). At BU, she has led several large research projects with increasingly wider international remits, expanding her critical insights into the links between representations, identity politics, social memory and practices; migration choices; international interventions, development, peace building and epistemic justice.

Tom van Nuenen is a Research Associate in Algorithmic Bias and Discrimination in the Department of Informatics, King’s College London. He also works as a Lecturer in Critical Digital Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. In his computational work, Tom is interested in public perceptions of algorithmic discrimination, as well as the development of harm relief methods and tools for explainable AI. In his digital ethnographic work, Tom focuses on the effects of algorithmic systems on public discourse. His latest book Scripted Journeys (De Gruyter, 2021) discusses these issues in the context of tourism.

Thomas Widlok studied for his MSc and PhD degrees in anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and worked at a number of universities and research institutions in Europe (including the UK). He is currently Professor in the Anthropology of Africa at the University of Cologne and member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is a specialist in comparative hunter-gatherer research but is increasingly also working on social processes in the large-scale societies of the Global North. His most recent book is Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing (Routledge, 2016).

Acknowledgements

The idea of this book started with an international conference in Mainz in 2020. Together with scholars from many European countries and the United States, we exchanged ideas and critically discussed ‘Police-translations and the construction of cultural difference in European police work’. We are grateful to the participants and discussants at the conference – Kamila Dąbrowska, Heike Drotbohm, Cornelius Friesendorf, Mirco Göpfert, Barak Kalir, Kevin Karpiak, Lena Kullmann, Eloísa Monteoliva-García, Philipp Schäfer Georgios Terizakis and Ioana Vrăbiescu. We would like to express our gratitude to the German Research Foundation/DFG for funding our project ‘Police-translations: multilinguality and the construction of cultural difference in everyday police work’ (BE 6695/1–1), and to the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Department of Anthropology and African Studies and the Center for Intercultural Studies (ZIS) for support. Last but not least, we are grateful to the contributors for an engaging collaboration, to the anonymous reviewers for their comments, to Theresa Radermacher for co-editing and to Lisa Schrimpf for her work that helped to make this publication a success.

Introduction: Policing differences: perspectives from Europe

Jan Beek, Thomas Bierschenk and Annalena Kolloch

Blurry smartphone or video footage of white policemen brutalising a young black man; subsequent protests, sometimes riots; calls for change and police reform or for the restitution of law and order; a swelling of news coverage and, finally, fading interest, because the news cycle turns to another topic. Such a series of events and the accompanying images have become emblematic of policing in the Global North. Since the 1980s, this sequence has run its course countless times in the US, the UK, France and recently also in other European countries (Loader and Mulcahy, 2003: 136–7; Waddington et al., 2009). While we could name specific victims in various countries, such a list would probably already be out of date by the time this collected edition is published. How to deal with differences based on culture, ethnicity and race – all highly problematic terms – has become a central issue of policing in the last decade (Waddington, 1999b: 54–5; Fassin, 2013: 216; Blanchard, 2014; Epp et al., 2014; Gauthier, 2015; Barker, 2016; Karpiak and Garriot, 2018; Mutsaers, 2019: 12).

If anything, the recent increase in the numbers of refugees and asylum seekers has made it obvious that Europe is changing rapidly. It has accelerated Europe’s conflict-ridden transformation into linguistically and ethnically more heterogeneous societies. The police are arguably one of the most crucial – and most discussed – state organisations which interact with an increasingly diverse clientele, often labelled simply as ‘migrants’. However, public preoccupation with dramatic incidents, emotionally charged images and heated debates carry a risk, namely, the displacement of more nuanced approaches and questions which are crucial to understanding the rationalities underlying the emblematic moments mentioned above. In this book, we look at everyday, often mundane, interactions between police officers and ‘migrantised’ actors in European countries and explore how both sides deal with perceived differences. By migrantised actors, we refer to actors who are are culturalised, ethnicised or racialised in these interactions.¹ A central part of our argument is that migrantisation can be found in many places all over the world, but is a particular dominant form of othering in Europe.

Many, if not most, anthropologists currently position themselves, in the field and in writing, with the victims of the police. In contrast, our contributors study the practices, discourses and beliefs of the actors with whom anthropologists do not as easily sympathise – police officers. We believe that such an epistemological positioning, while often ethically challenging, is unavoidable for a nuanced understanding of policing. By adopting an ethnographic and multiperspective approach, the contributors to this book study the possible course of action, perspectives and rationalities of both sides in the encounters. While these encounters are framed by asymmetries of power and knowledge, we consider the particular forms that these asymmetries take not as a given, but as objects of empirical research. Still, due to the positioning in the field, this approach also brings about new blind spots, differently shaped than those produced by the aforementioned anthropologists. Studying both sides of such asymmetrical interactions equally is challenging, because exploring these interactions on one side precludes the same level of contact with the other. While all contributors aim at realising multi-perspectivity, they often focus on the perspectives of police officers. Indeed, they also reveal that these perspectives are more diverse than often assumed, especially when comparing policing between European countries.

In the course of our empirical research, our contributors encountered – critical and/or affirmative – practices and beliefs that did not always fit current political-normative narratives on policing: police officers in Russia who search for offenders based on stereotypes of racial difference, but without espousing an openly racist ideology as they are migrants themselves (Khodzhaeva, Chapter 6); caseworkers in Switzerland whose practices of processing deportees are framed in racist images, which at the same time function as emotional coping mechanisms (Borrelli, Chapter 8); the seemingly objective artificial intelligence of big data policing in the Netherlands which uses ‘ethnicity’ as a variable (Mutsaers and van Nuenen, Chapter 3); Danish detectives who want to see criminals punished but are frustrated by their foreign suspects’ lack of fear of incarceration (Sausdal, Chapter 5); British police detectives eager to learn about the epistemological difficulties of using the concept of culture from an anthropologist (Schwandner-Sievers, Chapter 12).

One widespread preconceived notion, which is shared by the media, the public and some scholars, is that given ‘cultural’ differences account for how such encounters unfold. In this perspective – as Çağlar (1997) succinctly criticises – ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’ constitute pre-existing frameworks which actors carry with them into interactions, so to speak, and which largely determine interactional outcomes. In this collected edition, however, the authors study how such differences are constantly produced – or occasionally dissolved – in everyday police work. Inspired by authors such as Brubaker (2004: 10), Hall (2021b [1997]: 362), Hirschauer (2017: 51) or Nieswand and Drotbohm (2014), we understand these differences not as a determining factor but as a possible, dynamic result of these interactions and the differentiations taking place within them. To which degree these differences determine interactional outcomes remains, for us, an open empirical question. These forms of othering do not necessarily produce violent confrontations but can, as we will argue, lead to forms of translations, both between languages and normative beliefs; indeed, policing in general can be understood as a mediation between various social orders (Beek, 2016: 118–19; Martin, 2019: 102).

The contributions to this book raise four sets of questions: What specific differences are (re)produced in interactions between police officers and migrantised actors, how do various differences relate to each other and to what degree do they determine interactional outcomes? When they do not lead to violence, how are these differences bridged by translation and interpretation between languages and normative beliefs? What are the similarities and differences between police practices in European countries, and to what extent can we compare them with practices elsewhere, e.g. in the US or the Global South? Lastly, how do we, as researchers, politically position ourselves in this field, and what are the epistemological consequences of this positioning? These four sets of questions structure this introduction. Under four headings, we develop them based on the contributions and situate them in the wider literature.

The book itself is divided into four sections. ‘Categorisations of difference in police work’ brings together contributions that emphasise the technological, organisational and political framework of the (re)production of differences. ‘Doing differences in everyday policing’ is about everyday interactions between police officers and citizens. The third section, ‘Policing as translation’, contains contributions that focus on translations – both in a literal and metaphorical sense. Finally, ‘Police officers and ethnographers’ contains contributions that reflect on the ethical and epistemological implications of working with police officers. Our book presents empirically grounded contributions from various European countries which jointly develop a field of study and generate robust concepts in a highly politicised field, bringing together anthropology, criminology, history, sociology and linguistics.

Policing differences

Police work is about differentiating people according to rules and work-related routines (Lipsky, 1980: 59, 83). It shares this practice with other forms of bureaucratic work (Handelman, 1981: 7–8; Schiffauer 2020: 101). While this bureaucratic aspect is rarely emphasised as the main function of policing, authors such as Waddington (1999b: 41–2) describe police work as ‘patrol[ling] the boundaries of citizenship’, and Christensen and Albrecht (2020: 389) refer to it as ‘bordering’. When police officers arrive at a scene, look at a docket or narrate an incident, they perceive, verbalise and act according to differences – they ultimately ‘do’ differences. Some differences – and in their official self-presentation the most important ones – are of a legal nature: who are the suspects of an offence, who are the victims and who are the witnesses? Other categorisations are linked to professional routines: who is dangerous, who is compliant and who is just a bystander? When they identify people in writing, police officers also generate a myriad of other differences: name, date of birth, nationality, sex, place of residence, occupation, etc. Police officers thereby sort actors according to the dominant social categories of difference in their society. Some of these categories are linked with particular laws, regulations and organisational guidelines, e.g. for minors or foreign nationals. In addition to these explicitly used categories, police officers also use what Gauthier and de Maillard (Chapter 1) in their contribution call ‘underground categories’, i.e. work-related classifications that are covered neither by law, organisational guidelines nor by professional considerations (see also Jobard, 2006: 272). Such clandestine categories may be class, deviance from mainstream norms, gender, age, ethnicity, culture and race. They are ‘clandestine categories’ because their use in decision-making is forbidden by law and morally disapproved of in European societies which uphold the principle of equality before the law. Just as importantly, migrantised actors also refer to these categories, either to criticise police officers’ actions immediately or to account for police officers’ actions in retrospect. Of all the differences that are ‘done’ in policing, the latter three, i.e. ethnicity, culture and race, are particularly scrutinised by today’s public (and by this collected edition).

Indeed, the first part of the first question we raise, ‘What specific differences are (re)produced in interactions between police officers and migrantised actors?’, is about the situational production of ethnicity, culture and race. Given the other multiple differences mentioned above, secondly, it is necessary to situate differentiation according to culture, ethnicity and race in the larger police practice of classification and to explore how the actors relate these differences to each other. When looking at police work as a practice of differentiation, the crucial question becomes: which differences co-determine the interaction’s outcome? Additionally, we can also look at the making of cultural difference as a form of knowledge production – with often severe consequences for the objects of this production, ranging from fines and physical harm to legal proceedings with unforeseeable outcomes.

Let us turn to the situational production of differences. Ethnomethodological studies and interaction analyses have explored the everyday re(production) of difference, mostly looking at a specific difference, i.e. gender (Garfinkel, 1967; West and Zimmerman, 1987). More recent approaches look at the complex, dynamic interrelation of various dimensions of difference (Fenstermaker and West, 1995; Hirschauer, 2017). While cultural, ethnic and racial categories are based on experiences – related to common practices, social structures or the body of the other – it is only when actors perceive and emphasise a specific category that they are ‘doing’ this particular difference. In fact, we highlighted racial difference in the first sentence of this introduction, reflecting a current widespread public concern. However, all analytical categories run the danger of being essentialised and reified. This is why social scientists and scholars have largely ceased to use ethnicity and culture as analytical categories, and particularly anthropologists argue against the analytical use of ‘culture’ because it reifies differences that are not just out there (Abu-Lughod, 2008; Lentz, 2017; Schwandner-Sievers, Chapter 12). Correspondingly, Brubaker (2004: 10) argues that researchers should not use ‘categories of ethnopolitical practice’ – anthropologists speak of ‘emic’ categories – as analytical devices, but should understand them as categories for creating groups by naming them and thereby producing what they seem to describe. Likewise, as Merry (2005) argues, while the concepts of political activists and researchers may overlap, they act within different frameworks of truth and are guided by different knowledge interests which should not be conflated. These insights can also be applied to the category of race, which is also in danger of being essentialised. As Balkenhol and Schramm (2019: 588–9) write, researchers should ‘study race without reifying it’, by exploring its processual and relational character. Strategic essentialism might be a necessary strategy for activists. However, inspired by M’Charek (2013: 424), we propose to explore ‘how race is made relevant and materialises in a variety of ways’ ethnographically, looking at how this difference is evoked in particular situations. Following this line of argument, the contributors to this book analyse interactions between police officers and migrantised actors not as intercultural, interethnic or interracial interactions as such, but explore which kind of difference is evoked by whom and in which encounters. Hall (2021a [2016]: 404) likewise describes contemporary urban spaces as ‘an intricate network of differences, any of which can at any time be activated as a potentially explosive line of division’. These differences are explored as fluid, as they are situationally made relevant or ignored by police officers and migrantised actors alike. This requires the researcher to have an acute awareness of the intricate performances or speech acts which result in the making of these categories – e.g. as a result of a throw-away remark or a fleeting gesture in the course of an interaction. Also, these categories sometimes are the object of post-hoc deliberations of migrantised actors, regardless of whether or not they played a role. Borrelli (Chapter 8) describes how border police officers’ ‘vivid everyday images’ of the culturalised and racialised others are based on notions that people from the Global South are generally inferior, needy, dishonest and lack understanding. These images then frame later negotiations in Switzerland, often to the disadvantage of the migrantised actor, but are also part of police officers’ emotional labour that enables them to reduce stress. Still, we propose that such pejorative categories are not necessarily invoked in all interactions (Beek and Müller, Chapter 10; Khodzhaeva, Chapter 6; Müller, Chapter 7); indeed, we challenge the widespread assumption that they are always relevant in police work. We believe that such an approach creates a useful irritation because it highlights the fact that categorisations are brought up by both sides, often in unexpected ways. Müller (Chapter 7) explores how police officers employ the category of culture for citizens in Germany, yet also shows how some police officers themselves are migrantised, both by citizens and their colleagues. This prompts these officers to reflect on these categories and how they relate to their self-perceptions.

We also need to situate cultural, ethnic and racial differences within the wider web of differences and consider their relationality. The underground categories used by police officers are closely interwoven. As Hirschauer (2017: 42) notes, such dimensions of difference are confounded and cannot be clearly separated in their emic use. Using cultural difference or the status of the other as migrant as a ‘one-size-fits-all category’ allows police officers, as Leser (2020: 65) argues, to reduce complexity and blend various distinctions, ranging from gender to race. Pates (Chapter 2) writes that the specific police reporting practices and crime statistics in Germany and the UK that ascribe ethnicity to individuals can be read as different forms of ‘doing the nation’. While German police reporting seems to be technical and formalistic, it incorporates meanings that are heavily ethnicised, amalgamating it with notions of belonging. As Nafstad (Chapter 4) shows, policy phrases may also serve as joker terms to avoid bringing up morally and legally disapproved differences. She explores how the Swedish police use the term ‘parallel society’ as an ill-defined term which is – in an anthropological reading – about legal pluralism. The police, however, use the term to frame an issue as a problem and connect it with criminality, social inequality, religious extremism and ethnicity.

Even when differences are explicitly made, research has shown that racist or culturalist views are not as clearly linked with discriminatory practices as one might assume. This is in line with the general sociological argument according to which practices cannot simply be deduced from discourses or vice versa (Khodzhaeva, Chapter 6). For example, writing about ‘canteen culture’, Waddington (1999a: 302) argues that police officers use derogatory terms for certain groups backstage as a means of repairing their fragile status at the frontstage, but not as a ‘guideline’ for police practice. Fassin (2013: 160–8), in turn, concedes that there may be no clear-cut causal relation between the racist views and actions of individuals, but that racist remarks produce organisational procedures that target certain groups. These issues connect with the larger question regarding the relation between clandestine categories and legal and professional categories – raising the crucial question as to how much the former determine police practices, so to speak in the shadow of the law. Translated into the terminology proposed here, accusations of police racism are about this relationality of differences. Such accusations imply that police officers, in their encounter with migrantised actors, predominantly draw on notions of racial difference, while ignoring legal and professional aspects. As this relationality is embedded in discretionary police decision-making, its empirical disentanglement proves rather challenging. Epp et al. (2014: 5–7) substantiate a racial bias in investigatory vehicle stops in the US by partly using quantitative methods, while Mutsaers (2019: 46–8) describes the over-policing of migrant groups which has been accelerated by the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) elements into police work in the Netherlands. This is in line with Nafstad’s analysis that the Swedish police culturalise and ethnify certain groups and the urban neighbourhoods in which they live, thereby legitimising their over-policing (Chapter 4). Likewise, according to Fassin (2013: 92), French police officers enforce an order of inequality and injustice, instilling a ‘relation of subjection’ to migrantised groups with their control practices. On the other hand, Hunold (2015: 105) describes such interactions in Germany as largely respectful, while Nieswand (2014: 284), in his study of bureaucrats in a German youth welfare office, argues that cultural difference is only of marginal importance in bureaucratic decision-making compared to legal and professional categories. In a way, current debates are reminiscent of older discussions on ‘labelling’ in earlier years of police research (Feest and Blankenburg, 1972: 11; Skolnick, 1975 [1966]: 206), albeit now with a focus on race instead of class.² Indeed, current anthropological research on police discretion may help us to rethink the relation between clandestine and legal differences beyond binary categories, in so far as it understands police work as evoking multifaceted, interlaced and partly contradictory moral orders and rationalities (Beek, 2016: 100–1; Martin, 2019: 77–8).

By situating these questions in everyday practices, the contributions to this book blur the relation between clandestine categories and discretionary decision-making. In this respect, they also point to differences in policing practices across Europe: Gauthier and de Maillard’s (Chapter 1) contribution challenges the notion of a direct link between the two, by showing that both French and German police officers similarly engage in racialising discourses, but that the former discriminate much more frequently due to different work-related policies. Sausdal (Chapter 5) argues that the resentment of Danish police officers towards certain migrants does not primarily stem from racist views, but from the fact that these offenders create particular job-related problems for them when it comes to punishment, which impact on police officers’ self-respect. They believe that the foreign criminals who they have apprehended and brought to justice perceive their stint in prison as a hotel stay or ‘kindergarten’. This does not correspond to detectives’ understanding of just and appropriate punishment, and they therefore strive to find other means of punishment that they can dish out earlier.

Mutsaers and van Nuenen (Chapter 3), on the other hand, show how big data policing and artificial intelligence-based surveillance strategies can turn these ‘underground categories’ into official categories, shrouded by imaginaries of technical objectivity and neutrality. Their contribution thereby productively challenges the delineation between the categories that we employ in this introduction. A related, dominant research strand looks at the criminalisation of mobility, exploring how legal and clandestine categories are interwoven not only at the level of implementation, i.e. by everyday bureaucratic decision-making, but already in the phase in which government policy is conceived (De Genova, 2002; Vrăbiescu, 2019: 2). Kalir (2019), for instance, explores how officials tasked with deportations develop routines and justifications for being involved in policies that cause harm. In this perspective, policing enforces institutional racism at least in the field of deportation, irrespective of the particular views and practices of police officers as observed by the researcher. While the perspective is certainly illuminating when it comes to policy, it sometimes tends to overlook the fact that the implementation of such policies is a contradictory process, shaped by bureaucrats’ discretionary decision-making. Eule’s (2017: 6–8) ethnographic research findings on migration officials in Germany highlight the lack of interest and resources when it comes to the enforcement of policies such as deportation, and Eckert (2020) emphasises the importance of ‘bureaucratic ethics’ in such decisions. Andreetta (2019) even presents cases where Belgium asylum officials at least implicitly take sides with their clients, so to speak against the state.

Lastly, we look at the making of differences as a form of knowledge production or, as Pates (Chapter 2) puts it, as a ‘condensation of cognitive, bureaucratic and everyday epistemologies’. The actors who encounter each other create boundaries by ascribing cultural, ethnic and racial differences, but these boundaries also become forms of knowledge which enable them to understand the other. According to Brubaker (2004: 17), ‘[e]‌thnicity, race, and nationhood are fundamentally ways of perceiving, interpreting, and representing the social world’ – for all social actors, including police officers. These differences provide perspectives on the world, powerful lenses for actors to view differences. They supply the context for the existence of experts, brokers and professional intercultural mediators who provide translation between these codes, perspectival lenses and ways of seeing. Indeed, Beek and Bierschenk (2020: 9–10) understand bureaucrats as para-ethnologists who use the category of culture to make sense of their social world, not unlike classical anthropologists. Müller (Chapter 7), in her chapter, sees migrantised police officers in Germany as cultural experts, understanding them as linguistic and cultural translators and experts. Schwandner-Sievers (Chapter 12) reflects on how, working as an expert for the UK police, she has simultaneously supported their para-ethnographic research on ‘Albanian’ gangs but has also attempted to deconstruct an essentialised understanding of ‘Albanian culture’. Pauli Caldas and Widlok (Chapter 13) brought together students of a police college and of an anthropology department in Cologne/Germany in a joint research project, in which interesting methodological similarities and differences in the respective approaches of these groups to ‘foreign milieus’ emerged: While police officers are trained to grasp a situation quickly in order to filter it for potential future or past dangers, anthropologists are trained to engage in open discussions with their partners and to acquire knowledge by participating in their lives.

Understanding the doing of differences as a form of knowledge production uncovers various professional dilemmas. Being able to distinctly describe and identify people is part of police officers’ professional skillset, and this – often even officially – involves identifying individuals based on categories such as skin colour and, by extension, race. When it comes to the policing of migration offences, taking into account the presumed descent of citizens may indeed be an efficient way of identifying offenders, which is why Khodzhaeva (Chapter 6) speaks of ‘instrumental racism’ in this context. At the same time, the law demands that police officers be otherwise blind to this difference, and the public increasingly frowns upon mentions of it. When it comes to culture, too, police officers are expected to have intercultural knowledge, although use of this knowledge can also have results which are difficult to foresee. Pates’ contribution is situated at exactly this interface, exploring how German police officers transform ‘categories of seeing’ into ‘categories of reporting’ (Chapter 2). How police officers resolve this dilemma also depends on the specific historical trajectories in their countries (Gauthier and de Maillard, Chapter 1) and on their own migration background (Müller, Chapter 7).

Undoubtedly, these knowledge practices contain smaller or larger elements of epistemic violence (Spivak, 1988, following Derrida’s reflections on the violence inherent in any designation practice). Pates (Chapter 2) argues that policing, understood as processes of ordering and of putting bodies into certain places, is inherently violent. As social scientists writing on these issues, we also face such dilemmas when writing about difference, and the various authors of this collected edition resolve it in different ways. Anyway, doing research is – after all – also about differentiating between and describing people, even when we produce second-order observations.

Policing as translation

Current public debates and, in their wake, scholars (see the contributions in Karpiak and Garriott, 2018) frequently focus on the violent aspects of policing. Everyday police work, however, is rarely about (physical) violence, but more often, as Bittner (1967) pointed out over half a century ago, about communication. As we have argued, multiple differences are produced both by police officers and migrantised people. In their encounters, these differences, including linguistic differences, must be bridged. This happens through acts of translation and interpreting. We use these terms in a double sense: in an intuitively plausible linguistic sense and in a wider, figurative meaning.

First, within European countries, police officers and their counterparts are increasingly involved in encounters where they do not share a common language. In these situations, they need someone who is able to mediate, reproducing conversations and texts in another language. This might be a colleague, a bystander, a family member or a professional paid translator. In these cases, the interaction is no longer dyadic but includes a third actor or a group of actors, who can position themselves differently: neutrally, ‘with’ the police or ‘with’ the policed (Komter, 2005; Pöllabauer, 2005; Sami Sauerwein, 2006). Digital translation tools are also increasingly used (Kolloch and Meyer, Chapter 9; Müller, Chapter 7; Borrelli, Chapter 8). In these multilingual communicative acts, identities and communities are constructed; knowledge is exchanged, and communicative purposes are achieved, or not. And even if police officers and citizens practise some kind of ‘inclusive multilingualism’ (Backus et al., 2013) by using a lingua franca or by communicating partly in a foreign language, such practices bring about or reinforce perceived differences. Thus, contemporary everyday police work is partly shaped by the challenges of multilingual communication (Apfelbaum and Meyer, 2010; Meyer, 2018).

Second, translation also takes place in a more metaphorical sense. Police officers translate ambiguous, everyday situations into the operative technical language of the police, the language of the law, as well as into moral and other idioms. The deportation talks described by Borrelli (Chapter 8) are, for instance, mostly structured by the form that the caseworker fills out and therefore by organisational rationalities. The police officers’ migrantised others, in turn, translate these situations in terms of their experiences in other social and historical contexts. Beek and Müller (Chapter 10), exploring the communicative practices of German police officers, argue that misunderstandings often do not arise out of linguistic translations, but out of situations where police officers translate complex everyday situations according to organisational guidelines and legal norms; these forms of translation are about ‘doing police’ – the challenge of