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.

Reviews

'This book is a recommended study that nicely incorporates anthropology, criminology, history, linguistics, and sociology.'
Ryan Shaffer, Ethnic and Racial Studies

Introduction
Policing differences: perspectives from Europe - Jan Beek, Thomas Bierschenk and Annalena Kolloch

Part I: Categorizations of difference in police work

1 Police racism in France and Germany: occupational socialisation and institutional guidelines - Jérémie Gauthier and Jacques de Maillard
2 Policing order: ethnicity in statistics and the functions of nationalism - Rebecca Pates
3 Predictively policed: the Dutch CAS case and its forerunners - Paul Mutsaers and Tom van Nuenen
4 The social construction of parallel society in Swedish police documents - Ida Nafstad

Part II: Doing differences in everyday policing
5 Dirty Harry gone global? On globalising policing and punitive impotence - David Sausdal
6 Instrumentalising racism in Russian policing: everyday interactions between police officers and migrants - Ekaterina Khodzhaeva
7 Negotiating 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
9 Inclusive and non-inclusive modes of communication in multilingual operational police training - Annalena Kolloch and Bernd Meyer
10 Talking with hands and feet: language differences and translation in German policing - Jan Beek and Marcel Müller
11 The Portuguese police and colonial legacies: when language divides - Susana Durão

Part IV: Police officers and ethnographers
12 Albanian culture and major crime: challenging culturalist assumptions among investigating UK police - Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers
13 Approaching foreign milieus: experiences from a joint seminar with police trainees and anthropology students - Gisela Pauli Caldas and Thomas Widlok

Postface
Authorizing race: on police reproduction of difference - Ian Loader

Editors

Jan Beek is the leader of the research project 'Police-translations' in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Thomas Bierschenk is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Annalena Kolloch is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Bernd Meyer is Professor for Intercultural Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz