Abstract
The experience, common among minority ethnic populations, that they are racially targeted has typically been laid at the door of the police whose coercive practices and whose ‘institutionally racist’ culture have been blamed for this state of affairs. While police practice remains an issue, it is my contention that by focusing on police practice alone critical commentators can loose sight of the extent to which racial targeting is an outcome of the regimes of control integral to the wider governance of crime in the neo liberal state. By examining the implications of anti-terror legislation, by attending to the way centres of consumption in the entrepreneurial city are regulated and by looking at how problems of serial exclusion experienced by migrant populations in Britain’s poorest areas are managed, this paper examines how perceptions of racial targeting will continue to be reproduced independently of getting the police to change their practices.
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Hallsworth, S. Racial targeting and social control: looking behind the police. Crit Crim 14, 293–311 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-006-9014-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-006-9014-0