Greece: policing racist violence in the ‘fenceless vineyard’

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with Greek detectives carried out by the author in 2002, the Greek police’s attitudes towards migrant communities and racist violence are surveyed. Not only are migrant communities, particularly the Albanian, viewed as hotbeds of crime but racist violence against these communities is not viewed as a signi-ficant problem by the Greek police, who are usually indifferent to racially motivated crimes and often view racist incidents as acts of self-defence by Greeks against the criminal ‘other’. A transformation of such attitudes would require a public recognition of the widespread racism that exists in Greek society.