Ethnic profiling in the Netherlands? A reflection on expanding preventive powers, ethnic profiling and a changing social and political context

Abstract

Over the past decades the Netherlands has developed into a culture of control in which criminals and immigrants are mainly seen as 'dangerous others'. Tying in with this emergence of the culture of control is the development of a more preventive criminal justice system. By means of expanding preventive powers the criminal justice system is more and more aimed at detecting risky (groups of) persons as soon as possible. This so-called actuarial justice is accompanied by a great deal of discretionary power on the hands of those who have to enforce the law, bearing the risk that such powers may be carried out (in part) on the basis of generalisations relating to race, ethnicity, religion or nationality instead of on the basis of individual behaviour and/or objective evidence. The leading assumption in this article is that recent social, political and legal developments have increased the possibility for ethnic profiling in the Netherlands. Being a country of immigration, mostly immigrants tend to fall victim to these practices. Illustrated by the stop and search powers that have been introduced at municipal level in 2002 and in 2006 in the context of counterterrorism, the authors not only aim to provide insight into the complexity of actuarial justice in relation to ethnic profiling in the Netherlands but also aim to fuel the scientific debate on empirically researching ethnic profiling.

Suspect community or suspect category? The impact of counter-terrorism as ‘policed multiculturalism’

“…The struggles take place between the fields, but also within the fields, for the monopoly over the determination of the categories of suspicion. Robert Lambert's account of the stark differences between the Association of Chief Police Officers who targeted nonviolent radical groups such as the British Muslim Initiative (BMI), considering them linked to terrorist groups, and the Special Branch's MCU who actively collaborated with BMI to take the Finsbury Park mosque, is a good illustration of this point (Lambert 2011). The spreading of the imperative of suspicion to other fields (social work, education, medicine) has equally generated competitions for expertise, generating a proper cottage industry of experts and manuals, aimed at training non-professionals in the pro-active distinction between 'trusted', 'victims' and 'suspects', which has only started to be analysed through a sociological lens, in particular at the local level (Husband and Alam 2011;Thomas 2014).…”

The invader, the enemy within and they-who-must-not-be-named: how police talk about minorities in Italy, the Netherlands and France

“…What is at stake here is the relation between speech norms and how police interact with minorities. Police-minority relations are a central topic in race research and raise questions of social justice (Brunson and Miller 2006;Carr, Napolitano, and Keating 2007;Hasisi and Weitzer 2007;Sharp and Atherton 2007).…”

Proactive policing and equal treatment of ethnic-minority youths

“…In the literature, police discretion is generally regarded as a factor which facilitates and increases racial and ethnic discrimination (Mastrofski 2004, Talley et al 2005, Ridgeway 2006, Bowling and Phillips 2007, Walsh and Taylor 2007, Gau and Brunson 2010, Van der Leun and Van der Woude 2011. Reading this literature, it seems almost self-evident that when more objective, formal grounds for police intervention are replaced by more subjective judgements by police officers, this will increase the likelihood of discrimination of ethnic minorities.…”