Summary: This article focuses on the perspectives of young ethnic minorities in the Nordic countries who have experienced various forms of "police stops", i.e. situations where the police stop them without any reference to a specific event that the youth know of. Analytically, the debate is positioned through an intersectionality approach of (un)belonging to majority societies. Across the Nordic countries, we found that the young people described five social markers as reasons for being stopped, namely clothing, hanging out in groups, ethnicity, neighbourhoods and gender. We argue that the police stops explicate how the young men in particular are often forced to think about themselves in terms of "a threat" to the majority and the attributes they have that make them seem like criminals.

As different social groups are directly and indirectly confronted with diverse forms of police practices, different sectors of the population accumulate different experiences and respond differently to the police. This study focuses on the everyday experiences of the police among ethnic minority young people in the Nordic countries. The data for the article are based on semi-structured interviews with 121 young people in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark. In these interviews, many of the participants refer to experiences of “minor harassments” – police interactions characterized by low-level reciprocal intimidations and subtle provocations, exhibited in specific forms of body language, attitudes and a range of expressions to convey derogatory views. We argue that “minor harassments” can be viewed as a mode of conflictual communication which is inscribed in everyday involuntary interactions between the police and ethnic minority youth and which, over time, can develop an almost ritualized character. Consequently, minority youth are more likely to hold shared experiences that influence their perceptions of procedural justice, notions of legitimacy and the extent to which they comply with law enforcement representatives.

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This article addresses the perceptions and experiences of young ethnic minorities in Oslo and their frequent encounters with the police at the high schools they attend in the eastern and southern suburbs. These police meetings are mainly aimed at preventing crime, such as drugs at schools, and building trust with students and staff. Scholars, however, have debated how frequent controls and policing in more deprived areas inhabited by a large proportion of minorities can have negative effects on procedural justice. In this article, I demonstrate that the youth attending these schools can experience fear, stigma and injustice in the heavy presence of police on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. I argue that these encounters between youth and the police are key to address in order to inform our understanding of mistrust towards the police and challenge strategies of policing.