The invader, the enemy within and they-who-must-not-be-named: how police talk about minorities in Italy, the Netherlands and France

Abstract

International audienceHow people talk about ethnic minorities is a sensitive subject, especially in law enforcement. We know little about it as far as continental Europe is concerned. This article is about how police officers talk about minorities in France, in Italy and in the Netherlands. How do speech norms ("political correctness") apply outside the Anglophone world? Is there a relation between speech norms and practices? This exploratory study is based on interviews with 55 police officers from France, Italy and the Netherlands. In these countries, police officers are aware that displaying overt racism is not socially desirable. Interviews show that there are vastly different speech norms governing decent race talk in the three countries. Specifically, we compare: how police use ethnic categories; how police anticipate accusations of discrimination; and how police theorize the over-representation of ethnic minorities in crime. French respondents respect much stricter speech norms than Dutch or Italian ones

What Turns Migrants into Ethnic Minorities at Work? Factors Erecting Ethnic Boundaries among Dutch Police Officers

“…Respondents recurrently made statements that violate the law against discrimination. The non-migrant male researcher’s findings of the current study align very much with those of researchers with a different identity, including Bonnet and Caillault (2015, French background), Boogaard and Roggeband (2010, female background) and Çankaya (2011, Turkish-Dutch background), as well as with the national chief of the Dutch police, Gerard Bouman, stating: ‘The poison of exclusion creeps into our organisation’ ( NRC Handelsblad , 11 April 2015).…”

Selection in Border Areas: Profiling Immigrants or Crimmigrants?

“…4 Although vehicles do not have a nationality, this was a phrase commonly used by RNLM officers. 5 It must be noted that both speaking about 'appearance' or 'skin colour' and referring to the over-representation of certain ethnic groups in certain types of crime are common practice in the Dutch law enforcement discourse (Bonnet and Caillault 2015), whereas the term race is not commonly used.…”

“…Most research on profiling in law enforcement is (i) focused on regular police controls, often in the context of stop and searches or traffic stops, and (ii) conducted in Anglo‐Saxon countries with particular police‐citizens relations and a particular discourse around police‐race relations (cf. Bonnet and Caillault ). Yet, profiling is also utilised by organisations operating in other fields, other countries, within different contexts, with different histories and speech norms, and it is unknown to what extent existing findings are generalisable.…”

Devised to punish: Policing, detaining and deporting Romanians from France

“…Scholars have debated the role of policing in managing migration and have shown how police activities go beyond the declared scope of the institution (Garland, 1996(Garland, , 2013. In France as elsewhere, policing non-documented migrants becomes more and more the task of local police (Bonnet and Caillault, 2015;De Maillard, 2005;Fassin, 2013) and actions inland by border police (Bosworth et al, 2018). Moreover, an almost imperceptible shift has taken place from policing foreign nationals and petty criminals to policing EU citizens by combining the forces of two nation-state police institutions.…”