‘They are harsher to me than to my friend who is blonde’. Police critique among ethnic minority youth in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Young people belonging to categories and living in areas that are targeted by the police find more arguments for detailed police critique than others. When they narrate their assessments there is a series of experiential references being made, which can be used to sort out their police critique. This article draws on 20 interviews with ethnic minority youth in so-called vulnerable neighborhoods in Sweden. It shows how young people portray the police as sometimes profiling and racist, sometimes just and legitimate, and how they do so by comparisons and identifications. Comparisons within Sweden and identifications with police targets tend to result in more negative assessments whereas comparisons with countries of origin and identifications with non-targeted categories may result in more positive or mixed assessments. These young people also evaluate the police with reference to the stigmatization of their neighborhoods. To be stopped because you are associated with a residential area is described as deeply unfair, even if the police are polite, and observations of how the police change behavior in different areas promote critique. Our findings point to the importance of extending a criteria-based model of how today’s young people assess the police with a more social and ethnographic understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnicity
• racism
• discrimination
• comparisons
• identifications
• ethnic profiling

Introduction

Young people spending a lot of time on the streets have long been targeted by the police, even though most of them are law-abiding (Furlong 2013, 206). Young people within ethnic minorities are even more targeted – especially young men – and they tend to get in contact with the police in early ages (Brunson 2007). When they also live in areas that are targeted by the police – areas described as criminal, dangerous and insecure in the media – they have much better opportunities to give detailed and complex police assessments than others. Still there is sometimes an expectation that the police should be evaluated according to decontextualized versions of impartiality, fairness, honesty or respectfulness, as in Tyler’s (2003, 2015) theory of procedural justice. But such a criteria-based theory does not tell us the social story of how police assessments are accomplished in practice, especially not in contexts in which people’s experiences are charged and antagonistic to begin with. Sociological concepts that take young people’s situated examinations into account seem more suitable to grasp what is going on among ethnic minorities today when they relate to the police. To describe how the police ‘are harsher to me than to my friend who is blonde’ is a way to articulate police critique by narrating oneself in comparison with another, and therefore more substantiated, relational and political than more abstract utterances like ‘the police did not treat me fairly’.

In this article, we analyze how ethnic minority youth living in two so-called vulnerable urban areas in Sweden relate to the police in their oral descriptions and narratives. We draw on 20 qualitative interviews with ethnic minority youth and young adults, primarily in the neighborhoods of Araby, Växjö, and Rosengård, Malmö, conducted as the Swedish part within a Nordic collaborative research project. These young people live in a social context in which images of the police as unfair and prejudiced are prevalent and sometimes reproduced in everyday talk, and where the police also de facto are very present. We try to show how an interest in procedural justice can benefit from an analysis of contextually charged comparisons and identifications since it gives us a more vivid and ethnographic picture of police assessments. To widen the criteria-based model we suggest Merton’s (1968) reference group theory and its variants of today (see Åkerström and Jacobsson 2009, 54–55) in combination with previous research on the police, ethnic profiling and ethnic minority youth.

Background and analytical framework

Our study belongs to the Nordic project ‘Perceptions of procedural justice among ethnic minority youth in Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden’, funded by the Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology. A team of Nordic researchers have collected qualitative data on ethnic minority youth’s experiences of the police and started to analyze them from various angles (Solhjell et al. 2018; Birk Haller et al. 2018). Previous research in Nordic countries and elsewhere has shown that young people living in socially disadvantaged areas and belonging to ethnic minorities typically experience police interactions more often and more negatively than others. Brunson (2007, 75) argues that young people in such areas ‘have a considerable risk of experiencing direct and indirect contact with police because of the aggressive crime-control strategies to which they are exposed’ (see also Gau and Brunson [2015]). Young African-Americans interviewed in Brunson’s study said that they understood that the police had to use aggressive strategies in order to fight drugs and gang activities, but they also linked these strategies to their own personal experiences of being harassed by the police. Some young men even described how they were put in patrol cars, driven away, and left in other areas when the police officer had no formal evidence to arrest them.

Young ethnic minorities’ dissatisfaction with the police, which is often related to discrimination, is a well-explored area (see Fassin [2013] writing about (the city of) Paris, and Goffman [2014] writing about Philadelphia). As far as racial and ethnic profiling is concerned, most research belong to the U.S. and the U.K. (Östlund 2013; c.f. Harris 2006; MVA and Miller 2000; Bowling and Phillips 2007; Choongh 1998). Swedish research in this area is scarce, but it shows that ethnic minorities and racialized groups are subject to police control to a greater extent than others (Mulinari 2017). In Östlund’s (2013, 111) study of police officers in Gothenburg, Sweden, one of the officers explain that ‘if you are a young immigrant man driving a dark Audi A6 and lives in one of the suburbs you can expect to be stopped once a week’.

Studies have shown that ethnic minority youth often perceive the police to be biased, using exaggerated force and racist language. Non-whites are more easily picked up by the police, which then in itself produces a reason for keeping them under surveillance (Choongh 1998, 628). Some individuals become ‘permanently suspect’ and the police start thinking that they ‘process “the same dross”, “the same losers” again and again’ (ibid.). The police in Norway and Sweden are sometimes said to not inform ethnic minority youth of the reasons for being stopped and searched, and there is a strong conviction among them that they are both targeted (Sollund 2006; Mulinari 2017) and subjected to recurring harassments (Birk Haller et al. 2018). Pettersson (2013, 2014) also reports that young people with ethnic minority backgrounds who live in socially disadvantaged areas in Sweden repeatedly complain about the police being discriminatory. Görtz (2015) has shown that ethnicity is invoked and employed in police interactions in Sweden on a daily basis, both in discriminatory and playful ways.

It is important to note the significance of age, class and gender. Being young, male and racialized place you even more in the policing spotlight. Young men from ethnic minorities, living in so-called high-risk areas, are particularly subjected to police control (Pettersson 2013). Boys from lower class backgrounds in areas of high social deprivation are relatively available for policing, and if they commit crimes it appears to suck them ‘into a spiral of amplified [police] contact’ (McAra and McVie 2005, 9). A study of African-Swedes’ experiences of everyday racism describes ‘spontaneous police controls without any substantial basis’ and that this ‘seems particularly […] apply to young black men … ’ (Mångkulturellt centrum 2014, 63). Researchers have also tried to pinpoint discrimination quantitatively. For example, Carroll and Gonzalez (2014) showed that traffic stops in the state of Rhode Island in the U.S. are disproportionately focused on black drivers. Payne, Hitchens, and Chambers (2017, 877) emphasize that black men are ‘much more likely to be harassed and racially profiled by police than any other group’, but also that black women are ‘disproportionately targeted by police’. Hurst, Frank, and Browning (2000) argue that African-Americans perceive the police more negatively than whites and that young people have a more negative view than adults. African-American teens generally assess the police less favorable than white teens, even though the views were not significantly different when the teens evaluated actual encounters.

Some of our initial discussions in the project group not only revolved around this previous research but also around Tyler’s (2003, 2015) components in his model on perceptions of procedural justice. These include (1) participation, (2) fairness and neutrality, (3) dignity and respect, and (4) trustworthy motives. Tyler argues that feelings of being treated fairly increase if citizens believe that they can partake in the decision-making process, and that citizens in general place great value on politeness and respect in face-to-face contacts with legal authorities. Perceived trust and honesty influences citizens’ perceptions of the authorities’ legitimacy. But when we analyzed our data, we began to see that police-citizen relations are not only about direct contacts on specific occasions, but also about interpretations of other situations and encounters, as well as shared experiences and images of police practices. Assessing the police is a social, cultural and political matter – a matter of people’s identifications, references and accumulated experiences. We started to see Tyler’s theory as too static, atomistic and prescriptive in its approach, especially in neighborhoods particularly exposed to police surveillance. We do not argue that Tyler’s model would not work as a standard; of course it is necessary that the police act fair and with respect. But we call for more complexity in the understanding of how young people asses the police (cf. the discussion in Tyler 2017; Nagin and Telep 2017). Assessments of the police are also shaped by family, friends and neighbors and their migrated stories, as well as by shared images of stigmatized neighborhoods (cf. Nagin and Telep 2017) and how the police relate to that. Sometimes they are based on what Brunson (2007) call vicarious and accumulated police experiences, which are highly influential when the police are described as racially biased (Weitzer 2002). Merton’s (1968) classic theory of reference groups turned out to be helpful for us, along with its contemporary successors regarding everyday interpretations of comparisons and critical examinations (Åkerström and Jacobsson 2009). These young people articulate police critique by juxtaposing contexts, situations and places, and by identifying themselves with police targets as well as showing distance to them. ‘Others become a yardstick’, as Åkerström and Jacobsson (2009, 54) write – also in terms of other places and other situations – to carve our one’s identity and critique. By placing Tyler’s interest in fairness within an analytic frame that is more sensitive to people’s situated and interpretative examinations we could understand our data better.

Settings, method and analytical perspective

We conducted qualitative interviews with 20 adolescents and young adults in Sweden (13 men and 7 women, all but one aged 16–25 years)¹ with various ethnic minority backgrounds. The young people had lived in (sometimes also been born in) one of the following countries: Lebanon, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Macedonia, Kosovo, Syria and Chile. Our starting point was that the interviewees considered themselves to belong, or partly belong, to one or more ethnic minorities in Sweden, and that they comfortably talked about themselves in such terms (e.g. ‘I was born in Iraq’, ‘I came here when I was five years old’, ‘My parents are from Somalia’). We did not define in advance what exactly was to be counted as an ethnic minority, but asked young people from neighborhoods where we know that many minorities live and where young people’s identification with these minorities are usually explicit and taken for granted, often in combination with an identification as a Swede. We were careful to include both women and men in the study, albeit not primarily for comparative reasons. Young men with ethnic minority background may be in particular focus for policing, but young women also come in contact with the police, both directly and through others.

The interviews were based on a number of themes, with ‘perception of police practices’ and ‘personal experiences with the police’ of particular interest for this article.² Three interviews were conducted as group interviews with two interviewees. All interviews were open and exploratory, which means that the interviewees were encouraged to talk freely and develop their narratives on their own. For example, we could ask ‘What do you think about the police?’ and then encourage the interviewees to elaborate, or continue to ask follow-up questions based on the interviewees’ utterances. We did not put initiating questions on comparisons; they were mentioned spontaneously. Our purpose was not to study frequency or attain quantitative generalizability, but to discern social and cultural qualities of what the interviewees say about Swedish police and how they portray them. Using concepts transferable to other and similar contexts, we argue that the study should have analytical generalizability (Yin 2003; Becker 1990).

We use a narrative approach (Riessman 2001) focusing on the interviewees’ presentations of their own and others’ experiences. A research interview is not just an arena for delivering verbal information on a reality ‘out there’, but a situated piece of reality in itself; it is an arena in which to present oneself and manufacture accounts (Silverman 2007). This means that we combine a naturalistic reading of the transcript with an ethnomethodological reading (Baker 2002). We try to highlight how young people accomplish police skepticism, or the opposite, within a particular social context as a foundation (see Gubrium and Holstein 1997, on analytic bracketing). We have paid particular attention to so-called emerging categories, aspects that were not necessarily identified in the project proposal although they broadly revolve around justice, policing and ethnicity.

Eleven of the interviewees lived in Växjö, in the residential area of Araby, and five lived in Malmö, in the residential areas of Rosengård, Oxie, or Annelund. Four interviews were conducted in the small town of Ljungby in southern Småland (∼15,000 inhabitants), primarily for comparative purposes. Växjö is a city in southern Småland with approximately 65,000 inhabitants. Araby is a residential area (∼6,500 residents) constructed in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the so-called Million Homes program and is centrally located in the city. According to a report from the Swedish Police, 61 areas in Sweden are exposed to serious criminality and characterized by public insecurity and troublesome socio-economic circumstances (Nationella operativa avdelningen, Underrättelseenheten 2015, 2017). Twenty-three of these areas have been recognized as particularly vulnerable. Araby is one of these areas, as well as parts of Rosengård in Malmö.

In Malmö, we recruited interviewees through the so-called Läxhjälp (adults’ organized help with homework) and one of its associations in Rosengård. In Araby, we conducted our interviews in a public activity center in the area, attended by a lot of young people of varied ethnic backgrounds. Some of the interviewees in Araby were also recruited through equivalent homework assistance as in Malmö. In Ljungby, the interviewees were contacted through a private company working with an employment service, matching service and training for adults, many of them newly arrived asylum seekers. We did not contact potential interviewees in advance but went to locations where young people hang around and asked if they wanted to participate in an interview. David Wästerfors talked to young people in Rosengård in Malmö, and both authors talked to young people in Araby in Växjö. The sample is consequently not random but strategic and theoretically driven. We looked for actors who had something to say about police encounters and being young and racialized in a so-called vulnerable area.

Comparisons and identifications

The interviewees formulated their police assessments in several ways when interacting with us as interviewers, moving in and out of various frames of rhetoric. In these rhetorical movements, we found that comparisons and identifications were used in at least five ways.

Comparing countries and focusing on Sweden

When we asked the interviewees what they think about the police, they sometimes answered by relating to the police in other countries, usually their countries of birth or countries they have lived in or visited for a longer time. In this light, the Swedish police were described as acting in a just manner. Police in other countries were described as ‘creepy’, ‘violent’, ‘corrupt’, ‘dangerous’, ‘hard’ and ‘disrespectful’, whereas the police in Sweden were viewed as ‘kind’, ‘pleasant’, ‘nice’, and ‘helpful’. For example, Yasmeen,³ a 22-year-old girl newly arrived in Sweden, compared the Swedish police to the police in Iran and Afghanistan, where she previously lived.

Yasmeen:

In Iran and Afghanistan the police officers they are really (pause), well I don’t know they aren’t that, maybe they hit […]. But here in Sweden they look nice (laughs) […] Always they laugh and.

Veronika:

Ok, and they don’t do that in … ?

Yasmeen:

No. […] They are tough.

Kinsi, a 20-year-old girl with a Somali background, came to a similar conclusion.

Kinsi:

In my home country [Somalia] the police are dangerous. You cannot come near them. One feels ‘iiiih’ stressful and afraid. But in Sweden they are nice. […] They do not come and ask me, ‘What’s your name? Where are you from?’ […] They respect me as I am […]. But in my home country they come and ask you […] ‘Where do you come from?’ […] But here in Sweden, you are like other people.

Kinsi finds the police in Somalia more and improperly controlling, which created a sense of fear. In this sense, she is assessing the police somewhat in accordance with Tyler’s theory and its criteria of fairness and neutrality, dignity and respect. But phrases like ‘but in Sweden’ adds an additional component. Kinsi does not make her assessment merely according to criteria but uses a comparison.

A young man, 23-year-old Haider, contrasted the police in Sweden with the police in Iraq, and his comparison was more complex. Haider argued that the police in Iraq are different from those in Sweden, that the Iraqi police are harsh and unfair, but he also emphasized his higher expectations in Sweden. The Swedish police are still far from perfect.

Haider:

But in some way, if you are in the wrong place, you can get arrested […]. It should not be like in Iraq. In Iraq if you go to the other city they can take you. You can get caught directly, just because your name is Omar, your name is like Mohammed, you can be arrested […].

David:

What do you expect of Sweden then?

Haider:

Well, I expect more than that. I expect the police to be kind to those who are kind, they should be aggressive to those who are aggressive to the police. If I throw stones at the police, the police have the right to take me to prison immediately. But if I calmly walk away from the police, then the police don’t have anything to do with that. I should not have to ride my (expensive) bike and the police stop me saying, ‘Where have you stolen it?’ Ey come on, it’s just because I rode my bike in Araby isn’t it?

David:

Has it happened or?

Haider:

It has happened to everyone [in Araby], you know.

In relation to the arbitrary and overly controlling police in Iraq, the Swedish police are viewed as excellent, but Haider is still not satisfied. His comparison helps him articulate a sort of ‘baseline’ for police behavior in order to explain his higher expectations (‘well, I expect more than that’). The police have the right to be harsh and firm if met by the same attitude, but not if ‘I calmly walk away’. With the help of the interviewer's question, Haider moved away from Iraq and towards another and more implicit comparison. He argued that, in Araby, citizens are treated differently. Here, even an expensive bike may seem suspicious, as if it were in the wrong place. When Haider says, ‘it has happened to everyone’, he implies everyone in Araby, not in the rest of his city or country.

This step-by-step rhetoric, starting from other countries and ending up in Sweden and general experiences of its ethnic differences, reflects our research interest and interview questions. We set out to talk about the Swedish police, not the police in Iraq, Somalia, or elsewhere. Yet some interviewees found it engaging to make comparisons with other countries and then move to more specific and intra-national comparisons, as if striving towards more proportional clarity in that sense. An assessment of the police depends on the comparisons elaborated by the discussion and the group membership to which one refers (Merton 1968, 279–334).

In our interview with two young women from Somalia, they both started by comparing their experiences in Sweden to the police in Ethiopia and Somalia. The police in Somalia were described as ‘very creepy’. Ismahaan said, ‘They hit people.’ Abshiro said, ‘You hardly dare to stand in front of a police officer’ in Somalia. Ismahaan noted that she had personally not seen the Somali police hit people, but that ‘the elderly say so’, i.e. their elder family members, relatives, and friends. To trust the police in Somalia is a matter of having ‘cash’. If you can pay for yourself (i.e. bribes) you are more or less safe, but if you are poor you might face trouble; the police treat people differently according to their resources. ‘People are like poor and rich there,’ Ismahaan said. ‘Exactly,’ Abshiro responded, ‘we have no middle class.’ Ismahaan and Abshiro argued that even though the police in Ethiopia are basically as unreliable as the police in Somalia, Somalis in Ethiopia are safe from police harassment. ‘The funny thing is that we who come from Somalia had freedom,’ Ismahaan said. ‘They had more respect for us.’

As our talk continued, Ismahaan and Abshiro discussed the Swedish police, starting with phrases like ‘I have nothing against Swedish police … ’, ‘I haven’t seen anything strange … ’. But then they continued by describing more problematic aspects in Sweden. Ismahaan told a story about a girl belonging to an ethnic minority who she found naked and intoxicated in a street in Araby one night, and portrayed the behavior of the Swedish police as strange and formalistic. They refused to help open a door to let the girl enter her own apartment, and they kept on asking for the girl’s identity card and social security number. Swedish police have ‘too many rules’, Isamahaan and Abshiro said.

Ismahaan:

I was fucking angry.

David:

It was a little too square? Rules.

Ismahaan:

Too many questions to her [David: yeah] that she couldn’t answer [David: mm].

Abshiro:

So you just think ‘help her, period’?

Ismahaan:

Yes, either you help her or you don’t come over. That’s what I think. If you are a police officer, everybody says that you should help people, regardless of you’re a bad person or if you’re a good person.

David:

But you argued with the police, you may say?

Ismahaan:

Yes, exactly, I said to them ‘I don’t think it’s fair that you treat her in this way when you know yourself that she’s not a person who can answer questions and she doesn’t even know her name.’ You ask her what her name was, she says ‘I don’t know’ because she is not a normal person [since she is intoxicated]. She is not there.

In this interchange, Ismahaan explicitly criticized the Swedish police for not being ‘fair’ in a dramatized dialogue from this night in Araby. Her story is specific and personal, and she does not talk in general terms anymore about police in Somalia, Ethiopia and Sweden with the help of accumulated or vicarious experiences. She is focusing on a particular event in which she finds substantial evidence of a problematic aspect of the Swedish police: they are too strict and formal, they do not live up to a general expectation of helping people no matter who you are (‘if you are a police officer, everybody says that you should help people, regardless … ’).

 Ismahaan asks for ‘more … humanity’ from the Swedish police, so that they actually help those who need it. Although Ismahaan and Abshiro did not explicitly relate their critique to an ethnic bias here, at other times in their interview⁴ they argue that the safety of Araby and its ethnic minorities is neglected or downplayed by the police in Växjö. The circumstances around a girl in Araby not being helped by the police can be interpreted as a story about neglecting young people with the ‘wrong’ ethnicity.

Our point is that international comparisons initially sustain a positive assessment of Swedish police, but these comparisons are juxtaposed with or evolve into more specific descriptions with other and more national as well as local points of reference. The interviewees’ multiple reference groups (Merton 1968, 295) are put to use in the interview conversations. Unfair, arbitrary, harassing, and corrupt police behavior in non-European countries were clearly contrasted with Swedish police, as a narrative route away from police skepticism. But a still hard-to-reach ideal of much more fair, friendly, and law-governed behavior in Sweden quickly materialized in our talk through more adjacent and critical exemplifications. When the young people focused on the Swedish police, comparisons with other countries faded away.

Comparing residential areas

The young people also made comparisons between the police in their own residential area and the police in other parts of the city or at other locations within the area. Above we saw how Haider changed his focus from initially comparing the Swedish police to the police in Iraq to discussing how the police act in different residential areas in Sweden. In this context, criticism seems to increase. Like Haider, Cristian, a 21-year-old with a Chilean background, argued that the police act differently depending on which residential area they focus on.

Cristian:

You know, to be completely honest, almost the only encounters I have had with the police has been in Araby [Veronika: Okay.] I have never been stopped in Hovshaga [a middle-class area in Växjö] or in the city center. I have been stopped many times in Araby. [Veronika: Okay.] Eh I have had strange treatment, I have had good treatment, it has been different from time to time.

During the encounter the police act in a varied way, sometimes unfair, sometimes fair (‘I have had strange treatment, I have had good treatment’), but being stopped is described as only occurring in Araby. Cristian’s narrative complicates the abstract idea about fairness because it shows that a police officer may be described as just and fair, while at the same time being stopped may be perceived as problematic or illegitimate. Cristian also gave an example of how the same police officer change their behavior depending on the specific context in which the encounter occurs. He talked about how he used to practice a sport with two police officers.

Cristian:

I practiced this sport back then, together with two constables [Veronika: Yes.] and they were really nice until I met them in Araby and they did not say hello to me […]. For me this changing behavior […] only suggests a secret war, even more obvious, a ‘we and you’ even more obvious […] cause there is no other logic explanation for me than that […] that when we are at the club, then I was a fellow man, when I was out here then I was suddenly a suspect.

Veronika:

Yes. Is it just because you are from Araby?

Cristian:

Unfortunately it is so, unfortunately it is so, and it has been like that all my upbringing.

In Cristian’s narrative he looks at himself from the perspective of the police officers; when they met him at the training club in another area they saw him as ‘a fellow man’, but when they met him in Araby he became ‘a suspect’. The residential area, not the individual, shapes the attitude of the police, according to Cristian. He assess the police with reference to how strange it is to treat some neighborhoods differently than others, comparing one with another. He talked about ‘a secret war’ and about ‘we and you’ – that is, from the narrated point of view of the police.

Other interviewees argued that the police associate them with Araby, regardless of their specific location, and that is the grounds for their critique. The police’s knowledge of which persons live in Araby makes them treat the young people in a negative manner when they are situated also in other places in Växjö. For example, Sadri, a 16-year-old boy with Kosovo Albanian roots, depicted how he and his friends from Araby are also ‘checked’ thoroughly outside their residential area.

Sadri:

When you are in the city center sort of […] and then there are lots of policemen. They keep an extra eye on us, who are from here [from Araby]. You know we are from here. You know it right away. That doesn’t mean that we should be checked more just because we are from Araby. We’re in the city center to have fun just like everyone else.

Sadri assessed the police by comparing their activity in Araby and other places in the local area, focusing on their presence; they are constantly present in Araby, whereas in other places they are not. But if they are present in other areas (like the city center), they prefer to check the Araby residents who happen to be there. Sadri articulates his critique by comparing how the police perceive or judge citizens in certain ways depending on the residential area at issue, both in terms of the police gaze and in terms of being there.

Sadri:

In other places they [young people] drive without driver’s license all the time, they just ‘there are no police here anyway’ cause we meet people at school […] they drive like regular cars without license you know they just ‘there are no police here’, everyone is in Araby almost. […] and then these other places [Veronika: Yes.] they are part of the Växjö Police and the Kalmar Police they’ve got nothing- they have no police at all, they may perhaps encounter one like in a week sort of […] they can do whatever they […] you do whatever you want there like […] no one is checking them, they’re just checking this area.

According to the young people’s narratives, Araby is treated differently both discursively and practically. They describe the location both as a target for police surveillance and as neglected, which may seem contradictory but has to do with how the young people specify police activity. Police presence is about controlling and checking people in the area – not about the police being there for them, to support and to help. Similar to Choongh’s (1998, 632) observation, ‘the police believe that they must have control over “problem” communities’. Ismahaan and Abshiro, for instance, argued that Araby is neglected when the police are really needed by the locals.

Abshiro:

Do like this, call the police now and say that there is a problem in Araby Park. Do you think they’ll come? [Ismahaan: No.] I promise you, it has happened, they won’t come.

David:

You mean that the emergency takes too long time?

Abshiro:

‘What do you call from?’ ‘The Araby area.’ They won’t hurry up.

Abshiro describes how she saw a guy call the police at night. ‘The police did not come,’ although it was ‘chaos’ and people were throwing ‘stones and everything possible’.

Abshiro:

It was a man, I think he lives over there. He spoke Spanish anyway, and Swedish with me. Called the police, called the police. At two o’clock at night, I checked the window. (…) Where are the police? They will not come! In the morning you will see. It is the worst article on the newspaper that it has happened so and so. Where are the police? Because I saw that he called, that man, the police. The police did not come.

This narrative is a bit different from another example in which Cristian did not include comparisons with other specific areas but more implicitly framed Araby as an out-of-the-ordinary area (in a negative way) that is both neglected and targeted by the police. The description of this treatment is often related to how Araby is described in the media. Cristian argued that the police listen to rumors and simplified media depictions about Araby, but because the police are ‘the law’ they should be ‘above ordinary people’: ‘they should do their job no matter what they have heard that the young people are doing this or that in Araby they should still address every young person as every young person’.

What the young people describe is in a way consistent with how the policemen in Mulinari (2017) study on racial or ethnic profiling in Sweden argue when they say they do not engage in such profiling. The place, not the ethnicity, is central and, according to the police, this is because some residential areas are more exposed to crime than others. At the same time, Sadri portrays how young people from Araby are also controlled in other residential areas ‘just because we are from Araby’, and Abshiro emphasizes that police do not come to Araby when needed. So when the young people compare police behavior in different neighborhoods, they start to account for differences in terms of a stigmatized and implicitly racist image of their own neighborhood (cf. Alinia 2006, 64, on ‘suburb’ and ‘immigrant’ as tightly associated in Sweden). They also describe this image as essential in the police gaze: the police ‘see’ Araby when Araby youth walk any street in Växjö. To be stopped for such reasons is described as unfair, regardless of whether the police are nice and polite when stopping you (cf. Tyler 2003, 334, 341).

Comparing police targets

A related critical view of the police arises when the interviewees compare how the police act towards themselves and how they act towards others. Here, the ethnic or racial background becomes more explicit and sometimes central, in contrast to the descriptions above in which the residential area was highlighted and ethnicity more implicit. Malik is a 25-year-old man of Iraqi background.

Malik:

So, what I have seen, my picture of it, they are harsher to me than to my friend who is blonde […] it has happened to me many times, too […] that if I’m with someone, I do not need to mention names, my blonde friend with blue eyes […]. Do you understand? Do you get it?

David:

A Swedish look or?

Malik:

Well, he is much more, you know, better treated and easier released. But no, they may have [inaudible] me and leave urine sample. Must sit for a couple of hours and talk and explain my life to them. Although I know that they know the whole.

David:

You are brought in or arrested and have to leave urine sample?

Malik:

It has happened. It has happened many times.

Malik told us that he has often experienced police bias. He did not explicitly state that he thinks the police are racist or prejudiced (Kirkwood, McKinley, and McVittie 2013), but by referring to his blonde, blue-eyed friend he portrays the police as at least ethnically discriminatory. Sadri, who told us that he himself has been beaten by the police, pointed out that his friends, who also have immigrant backgrounds, have had similar experiences of police violence: ‘I have not heard of any Swede who have been hit by the police you, know […]. Only maybe Swedes who have grown up in a suburb’. By referring to his immigrant friends (i.e. create consensus [Potter 2000, 150]), Sadri argues that police violence is common but also that persons with immigrant backgrounds are seen as the targets. However, by Sadri’s reformulation about the fact that Swedes may be treated in the same way as immigrants if they have ‘grown up in a suburb’, the specific residential area becomes central again and ethnicity downplayed. Yet, it is clear that Sadri believes that the police do not treat everyone the same.

Ismahaan agreed that the police treat young persons with immigrant backgrounds in a different and much more negative manner than young Swedes.

Ismahaan:

The thing is that when a youth […] who has another background, who is not Swedish, meets a police officer, the police themselves treat them as they are idiots. Do you understand? But if you are Swedish and did something wrong and the police come and talk to you calmly and say ‘why did you do that?’

These kinds of narratives clearly show experiences with and beliefs about the police being discriminating, disrespectful and even violent. To a certain extent, the young men and women assess the police in accordance with Tyler’s components, i.e. in relation to how he emphasizes that the police should not act. They want the police to act procedurally just, with fairness, neutrality, dignity, respect and trust, but they also accomplish their assessments in relation to something else. They compare police behavior related to specific targets and thereby situate and substantiate their critique.

 There were also narratives, though, in which the police are described as friendly and fair even if the conversation revolves around the ethnic background. Reeza, a 16-year old girl from Lebanon living in Rosengård, Malmö, talked about the police being ‘nice’: ‘You know the police […] they have never asked me “where do you come from? where do you live?” and such things. […] They are nice.’ When the interviewer asked if she might have felt singled out due to ethnicity, Reeza answered, ‘No.’

David:

Could you describe your opinion about the police in Sweden?

Reeza:

They’re nice. They are not ‘the bad ones’, as some say.

Reeza’s formulation ‘as some say’ leads to our next theme: young people’s dis-identification with those that should be policed.

Dis-identifying with police targets

A quite clear route to police criticism consists of distance to local police targets in combination with experiences of being controlled anyway. The young people sometimes emphasized or indicated that they clearly do not belong to those who make trouble: ‘I haven’t done anything!’ The fact that they still feel overly controlled builds their argument that Swedish police cannot be trusted. They argued that the police associate them with criminality regardless of how they behave individually. For example, Haider explained that he shares the police’s view that ‘some’ young people in Araby should be controlled but criticizes the habit of lumping people together.

Haider:

Okay, some cause trouble and I agree with that. Some cause trouble but that’s not our thing [Swedish vår grej]. […] There was a fuss between two and then all of Araby had to suffer. What’s the rest got to do with it?

Haider identified with the law-abiding citizens in Araby – crime is ‘not our thing’ – thereby highlighting his distance from legitimate police targets. His critical attitude towards the police is based on a stigmatizing police gaze; the police mysteriously include ‘the rest’ in Araby, when they should concentrate on ‘some’. Haider’s dis-identification from those who ‘cause trouble’, his non-membership of a reference group (Merton 1968, 347–351), makes it possible for him to criticize the police without dismissing a substantial part of their work. He stated that there are troubles in Araby, but the police do not distinguish ‘some’ from ‘the rest’.

 The police’s habit of lumping people together can also be criticized on the basis of ethnic and family relations. Tony, a 20-year-old with Macedonian roots, told us how he constantly has to answer for the criminal activities of his family members when he is checked by the police, as if he belongs to those ‘permanently suspect’ (Choongh 1998, 628). Again, dis-identification with a police target works as a point of departure.

Tony:

You know in Sweden in general so, I really don’t know. They do their job, whatever they should. But in Växjö in particular, I’m such a person, I’m very calm, I haven’t done anything, I never do anything either. I hardly drink alcohol, but I do not like the police here. I have experienced so much negative from them so I have lost all respect for them in recent years. […] For example, both my father and my brother, they haven’t always been the best people in the world, but the matter is that as soon as the police look at my ID card, I have never been in trouble with the police myself, but my patience is running out cause as soon as they notice my last name, it’s ‘Ah, but you’re his son’ or ‘You’re his big brother’ […]. Then they address this issue every time they see my last name and it’s not very fun for me either.

First, Tony distinguished between ‘Sweden in general’ and Växjö, so that his critique is narrowed down to his hometown. Second, he testified about his individual behavior (‘I’m such a person, I’m very calm … ’) and set up a contrast towards how the police treat him. He mentioned phrases used by the police when confronting him as evidence of him not being treated fairly; the police are openly prejudiced because of his father and brother. Tony’s assessment is built on distance markers towards his family members, but in quite soft and implicit forms (‘they haven’t always been the best people in the world … ’), as if simultaneously keeping his bonds intact. Tony argues that the police should see the difference – he is not identical to his father and brother – but they do not.

The young people may also dis-identify with those who ‘hate’ the police and commit crimes against them. Massoud, a 17-year-old male with Iranian-Turkish background, mentioned that Swedish police are usually not aggressive and are actually risking their lives. Later, the interviewer asked whether that means that other people ‘are more skeptical towards the police’ than he is. He replied that some people ‘dislike police officers’ because they think the police ‘target a particular group of people’ as the police do in the United States: ‘There they believe that police officers only target dark-skinned people.’ Therefore, young people ‘are throwing stones at the police and so on because they hate the police.’ In this case, a dis-identification – Massoud clearly does not portray himself as a police-hater – is embedded in a positive assessment of Swedish police (i.e. ‘others hate, but I don’t’).

In contrast, the type of dis-identification that can be found in police skepticism is aimed at what the narrator thinks are legitimate police targets, not ideological or imaginary targets. The young people argue that relevant police targets must be delimited but universal; they can be found anywhere in society, not just in Araby or Rosengård. For example, Ismahaan talked about young people in Araby who ‘do a lot of stupid things’, but she also adds ‘not all’.

Ismahaan:

Then there are people, of course, young people do a lot of stupid things here in the area you know. I think so too, but if you show-

Abshiro:

Not all.

Ismahaan:

No, not all [young people].

Abshiro:

They are everywhere in the world.

Ismahaan:

The bad.

Abshiro:

The small, the few troublesome young people. Those who really want to mess up.

Ismahaan:

Destroy. Exactly.

Ismahaan and Abshiro distanced themselves from ‘the few troublesome young people’ in Araby, but they also detached this category from Araby (‘they are everywhere in the world’), indicating other explanations for crime than the locally or ethnically grounded. Later in the interview, Abshiro stated that Swedish authorities should try to get to know immigrants better in places like Araby to ‘cooperate’ with them, and when doing so they should take into account that immigrants may be afraid of the police due to previous experiences in their countries of origin. Otherwise, the distance will just grow, and people will start ‘hating each other’ (native Swedes and immigrants). ‘Cause now’, Abshiro said, ‘one already hates the police’. She did not say ‘I hate the police’, but presented her observations of others’ emotions, close to hers but still a bit distanced.

In other words, dis-identification with police targets may open up possibilities to articulate not only complaints about prejudiced police, who control too many, but also accounts of police hatred. The narrator can portray the non-cooperative police as contributing to a problem they should be solving.

Identifying with police targets

A fifth and final way to formulate assessments of the police in our data was built upon identification with those who are viewed as police targets. These identifications are nuanced or characterized by ambivalence or temporal detachment. For example, Cristian distanced himself from other young people who say they hate the police, but he also identified with their situation. He did not claim to belong to them now, but he did so in the past. He pointed out that he knows more than today’s police targets and that there is no point in hating and throwing stones anymore, although he once shared this feeling. He talked about how he had some problems when he was younger and how he, as a 13-year-old rapper, wrote ‘fuck the police’ lyrics.

Cristian:

I could recount bad things that I have seen with my own eyes before me sort of but that’s no point cause I will only provoke my fellow men […] if I go about rapping about when I saw a police officer break a fourteen-year-old’s arm [which he explains he has seen] […] then they will be even more provoked to burn cars […] and hate the police […]. I don’t want, I don’t want anyone to hate policemen […]. I want them to feel safe by the poli- I want to feel- I want the young people around here to sense that the police protect them […] because they are Swedes now […] they have come from another country, but they are Swedes now … […] Here [in Araby] nobody wants to become a police officer […] people hate the police […], rather they are afraid than hating them […] because what I see it’s not hate, it’s not hate, you know, it’s fear […] they only choose to show it like hate because then it will not look as cowardly.

Cristian first explained that, in Araby, ‘people hate the police’, but then reformulated and said ‘rather they are afraid than hating them’. By using ‘people’ and ‘they’ he distanced himself from these emotions, but he also said that if he would rap publicly about his own experiences, a possible outcome would be more aggression towards the police. Christian presented himself as a forgiving spokesperson for the young people in Araby. He conveyed a conciliatory moral: young people’s way of expressing their frustration is counterproductive. ‘They think it’s their ventilation’, he said, ‘they do not understand that they make it worse for themselves’. He shares other young people’s frustration, he identifies with them, but today he does not share their ‘solution’.

Cristian:

I only do this [partake in the interview] because I want it to be one opinion that is distinguished from the others […] that they [the police] should know that there are people who care […], who will not speak up by burning a car.

Malik, a 25-year-old man of Iraqi background, also expressed criticisms towards the police by showing his support for the ones who are targeted at the same time that he distanced himself a bit from them. But Malik is more discouraged than Cristian, and far more resentful. He has had ‘a lot to do with the police’ over the years and seen ‘misuse of power’. When he was arrested at his home it was not a pleasant experience.

David:

What happened? Can you tell?

Malik:

Tell and tell, I can tell you when I was arrested. I was arrested at a police intervention at my place. There were a lot of police officers, a lot of police cars. It was because of an assault. It was a huge exaggeration. There were things being done in front of my parents’ eyes that shouldn’t be done, you know. During the arrest. You understand? But I come peacefully and friendly and greet them. Then, when they are done, they start wrestling me down. We talked just normally. Everything was okay. But then when we were done with the talk they started wrestling me down, like. To do their job. ‘Do you wanna handcuff me? Please, here’s my arms, handcuff me, my friend.’

Malik carefully emphasized his calm and friendly attitude and his initial non-violent contact with the police (‘I come peacefully and friendly and greet them’). This contrasted with the unprovoked violence that fits into Malik’s and others’ narrative of a deeply prejudiced police authority. He also said that he ‘avoided making resistance’ because his parents were there, but the police did not show the same respect. This story frames other statements during the interview with Malik, so that he presented himself as particularly capable of understanding and explaining others’ police criticism in Araby, as well as police hatred. He has personally felt police officers’ misuse of power. ‘There is no understanding between young people and the police here at all’, he said. ‘I do not think the police’s work is so good actually’. ‘I’m no fan of it’.

Malik said he has never called the police himself when victimized, but instead ‘fixed it’ himself. He also implied that his friends in Araby all think the same. He said that what he tells is nothing new: ‘I think you [as researchers] have heard [already] what most people have said’.

Malik’s advice to the police is to ‘get to know’ young people in Araby, ‘get to understand them’. The police have to ‘think twice’ before they intervene with a guy who is ‘a little wilder’, and make sure they do not ‘bring him down in front of his friends’, ‘cause no one will allow that’. Throughout his talk, he continually assessed the police using his own and his friends’ experiences as a resource. He points out ethnic profiling and lack of procedural justice in Araby, but first and foremost the lack of sensitivity and face work. The police are too clumsy in their communication and too ignorant when operating in his neighborhood. Sometimes policemen dress up in hoodies (as constabulary) and try to blend in. ‘I promise you … you see through that at once’.

Conclusion

In this article we have tried to show how an interest in how young people assess the police against standards of procedural justice (Tyler 2015, 2003, 329) fruitfully can be placed within a more interpretative framework, in which actors articulate police critique with the help of a series of compound referrals and examinations (cf. Åkerström and Jacobsson 2009). Young people within ethnic minorities in heavily policed neighborhoods often narrate both individual and collective experiences of police encounters, and they do so in a situated and politically charged way. Previous research suggests that ethnic minority youth are continually singled out by the police, that they are often dissatisfied with the police, and that they understand their dissatisfaction as discrimination (Pettersson 2013, 2014; Sollund 2006; Sharp and Atherton 2007; Fassin 2013; Flacks 2017). Police assessments in such contexts are constructed not only on the basis of abstract criteria but also in ways that visualize, draw on and criticize this very context. They are situated accounts that invoke local events and networks, and personal as well as vicarious observations from several places, and they seem structured according to social comparisons and identifications. In our case, comparisons with police in other countries and dis-identification with local police targets tended to serve as a means to conduct mixed or relatively satisfactory assessments, whereas comparisons with other residential areas and other ethnicities, as well as identifications with local police targets, contained a range of critical points. By reflexively moving in and out of various comparisons and identifications, the young people portray Swedish police officers as either relatively partial and racist, or relatively fair and legitimate. They carve out a preferable police force that would ideally operate without attaching a simplified media picture to individuals, without lumping people together during interventions (or neglecting to help some), without associating a particular urban area and its crimes with a particular category of people, and without routinely stopping some more than others. These experiences – especially the negative ones – constitute an important phenomenon as such, since, as Tankabe (2009, 14) argues, even a fair procedure ‘ … cannot effectively neutralise negative reactions to unfair outcomes’.

This is because people soured by experiences of consistently unfair outcomes are likely to see the procedure as a sham, orchestrated to make them feel good when indeed it has no bearing on the outcome.

Police critique is performed in complex and probing ways that obscure many attempts to summarize them, such as in terms of all-encompassing police hatred. Ethnic minority youth alternately frame their talk about the police in international, national and local perspectives, sometimes talking about a selective police gaze, sometimes about police officers’ physical presence, and they alternately dress their stories in ethnic and non-ethnic terms. Sometimes young people within ethnic minorities orient themselves to others in their (expected) group, sometimes not, and the very ‘dynamics of selection of reference groups’ (Merton 1968, 293) is an implicit topic in their talk. The young people in our study formed their assessments both from the standpoint of a crime-afflicted, heavily policed and stigmatized area, and from the standpoint that the police should do their utmost to operate so that the particularities of such areas did not steer them towards injustice. They discussed values such as fairness, neutrality, dignity and trustworthy motives by comparing expressive examples and situations, invoking others’ or shared experiences, showing closeness to or distance from the involved actors and their category membership, and by indicating how negatively their neighborhoods are typically framed by others. They narrated and evaluated the police in a web of quite concrete comparisons and identifications, politically charged and experientially multilayered.

So if young people’s assessments of the police in targeted areas are to be taken seriously, we must learn to listen carefully when they articulate them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Scandinavian Research Council for Criminology.

Notes

1 One of the interviewed men was in his thirties but referred to his experiences as a younger man.

2 The other themes were local area, everyday life and the police, och experiences with different kinds of policing.

3 All the interviewees’ names are fictitious.

4 Later on in the article, we show how Ismahaan and Abshiro talk about the Araby area as ignored by the police in emergency situations. ‘Do you think they’ll come? I promise you, it has happened, they won’t come.’