Geopolicing race, gender, and class: How the police immobilise urban allochthones

Sinan Çankaya*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

City landscapes are ever-changing stages for the protagonists that pass through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses to positively and negatively code subjects. As such, geography matters to the body. Rather than taking geographic locations, crime statistics, predictive maps and human bodies as objective truths, I focus on the work of police officers, not in terms of an instrumental-rational “meeting of policy targets” or attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make raced, gendered and classed geographical differentiations. This process culminates in geopolicing: the spatial imaginations and practices of police officers as to who, what and where to police and, of course, why. Geopolicing includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of urban “matter out of place”. Police officers perceive exclusionary territories in which landscapes racialised as white and identified as affluent are threatened by urban allochthones identified by class, race, gender, age and residential status. The findings are based on my ethnography among police officers in the city of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, between 2007 and 2011.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)702-721
Number of pages20
JournalAntipode
Volume52
Issue number3
Early online date29 Feb 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2020

Keywords

  • intersectionality
  • police organisation
  • race and class
  • racial profiling
  • racialisation
  • spatial exclusion

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