Tag: police

Kammersgaard, Tobias, Thomas Friis Søgaard, Torsten Kolind, and Geoffrey Hunt, ‘Most Officers Are More or Less Colorblind’: Police Officers’ Reflections on the Role of Race and Ethnicity in Policing. (2022)

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Kammersgaard, Tobias, Thomas Friis Søgaard, Torsten Kolind, and Geoffrey Hunt, ‘Most Officers Are More or Less Colorblind’: Police Officers’ Reflections on the Role of Race and Ethnicity in Policing, Race and Justice, 2022, 21533687221127445

Several studies worldwide have demonstrated that ethnic minorities are more likely to be stopped, questioned and searched by the police. In this paper, we explore how police officers themselves discuss and make sense of ethnic disparities in police stops. Based on interviews with 25 police officers in two police precincts in Denmark the paper illustrates how officers actively reflect on the (un)importance of ethnicity for policing. Findings point to how the officers both rejected that ethnicity directly mattered for who they chose to stop, as well as how they offered alternative and indirect explanations for why ethnic minorities were stopped more often.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/21533687221127445

Søgaard, Thomas Friis, Torsten Kolind, Mie Birk Haller, Tobias Kammersgaard, and Geoffrey Hunt, ‘Filming Is Our Only Weapon Against the Police’: Ethnic Minorities and Police Encounters in the New Visibility Era. (2022)

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Søgaard, Thomas Friis, Torsten Kolind, Mie Birk Haller, Tobias Kammersgaard, and Geoffrey Hunt, ‘Filming Is Our Only Weapon Against the Police’: Ethnic Minorities and Police Encounters in the New Visibility Era, The British Journal of Criminology, 2022, azac056.

Based on Goldsmith’s (2010, ‘Policing’s New Visibility’, British Journal of Criminology, 50: 914–34) assertion that police work has acquired a ‘new visibility’ with the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, recent studies have explored how ‘video activists’ often film the police as means of protecting marginalised ethno-racial communities. However, limited research exists on how non-activist ethno-racial minority young people use cell phone cameras in encounters with the police. Based on 37 interviews conducted in Denmark, this paper explores the multifaceted nature of marginalised ethnic minority young people’s use of cell phone cameras in police encounters. We demonstrate how the filming of officers is interwoven with the young people’s street culture, and how the use of cameras holds the potential to counter traditional power imbalances, while nevertheless, potentially exacerbating their antagonism towards the police.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azac056