Abstract
Scholarly literature offers much insight into aggressive policing of racial minorities. However, research is not equally extensive regarding the experiences of racial minorities with law enforcement when police response might be decisive for their sense of recognition and protection as a community. Bridging debates from critical race studies, hate crimes and legal cynicism, this paper addresses how policing of racist victimization is experienced by members of racially targeted communities in Sweden. Drawing on interviews with people having personal and/or vicarious experiences with racist victimization, I analyze resentful reliance on the police through the concept of legal estrangement. While most respondents describe police treatment in somewhat positive terms, there is a shared resentment at the police due to the lived experience that racism often remains undetected. Previous interactions with law enforcement also pave the way for accumulated skepticism toward the utility of the policing of racial hatred. Disenchantment with law enforcement notwithstanding, reliance on the police manifests a will not just to be recognized as a victim, but also to make the pervasiveness of racism more visible.
Introduction
Recourse to law enforcement is a thorny question for the racially targeted members of minority populations and communities of color. Reporting racist victimization to the police, for one thing, can be regarded as necessary and instrumental in redressing the harms inflicted. Given the history of the strained relationship between the agents of law enforcement and racial minorities, however, contacting the police might turn out to be a perturbing experience inimical to, rather than reassuring, one’s sense of recognition and belonging. Racist offending may thus leave many victims, primary and vicarious, in quandary as to the involving of the police. Hence, examining in what ways minorities experience the policing of racial hatred can help us explore the different layers of, and develop a conceptual framework to understand, this question.
The current study introduces the notion of resentful reliance on the police to comprehend the perplexities of minority resort to law enforcement in situations of racist victimization. I address this question empirically through a qualitative inquiry based on semi-structured interviews with 19 people, who have personal and/or vicarious experiences with racist offending and its policing in Sweden. By resentful reliance, I refer to a somewhat persistent reliance on the police despite frustrations with law enforcement that are directly or remotely linked to being racially targeted. Resentment at the police grows, on the one hand, out of a shared experience that racist victimization is seldom recognized and remains unseen. I argue that racism perceived as unseen or undetected can be related to what has been contested as the ‘mainstream idealist views’ that reduce racism to its most flagrant forms and self-claimed bigotry (e.g. Bonilla-Silva, 1996, 2015). On the other hand, resentment also stems from an accumulated skepticism toward the handling of racial hatred due to the previous interactions with, or undertakings of, the police that may give rise to a sense of being unworthy or perceived as a suspect community.
In this light, the present work brings in insights from critical race theory to normative discussions about inclusion and recognition within hate crime scholarship. In particular, I juxtapose the proposition that manifestations of racism in a colorblind age 1 cannot be readily reduced to beliefs in, and ideas about racial hierarchy, with the fact that enforcement of hate crime provisions is largely predicated on demonstrable and measurable individual hostility or prejudice. I present this as a conundrum for the prospects of social justice enshrined in normative accounts of hate crime laws, and yet one that may help us understand, at least partially, why police response to racial hatred is more often than not experienced as racism being unseen.
The current study also borrows from Monica C. Bell’s (2017) definition of legal estrangement both to fathom respondents’ reliance on the police, and to point that their discontent with policing cannot merely be attributed to individual attitudes. The concept of legal estrangement builds on a critical reinterpretation of legal cynicism, originally defined as anomie about law and societal norms (Sampson and Bartusch, 1998), whereby Bell put further emphasis on the structural dynamics regarding the alienation of communities of color from the agents of criminal justice. Considering that racism and racial exclusion are more than individual, to a large extent collectively lived experiences, and that skepticism toward the police may not be limited to racist victimization only, resentful reliance can be better understood as structurally embedded and needs to be located in the broader regime of exclusionary processes in society. Indeed, ‘personal and collective experience of racist expression or action’, as Goldberg (2015: 31) observes, ‘will be a function, then, of underlying structural conditions, more or less directly’. Even though this paper attends to racist victimization as a whole, it would nonetheless be simplistic to argue that the nature of experiences with policing is undifferentiated among particular minority groups and communities, just as the meanings that can be attached to those experiences might also vary within groups depending on age, gender or class. Expressions of resentment in any case render reliance on the police seemingly contradictory; yet underneath this paradoxical reliance can be noticed a shared will to be seen and recognized, and to accentuate the pervasiveness of racism in society.
Lingering Racisms and Conundrums of Hate Crime
Racism’s resilience in liberal democracies not only raises discomfort but also divides scholarly accounts. ‘Explicit’ manifestations of racism, it is often claimed, have become less common and more unaccepted than the now denunciated, if not wholly confronted, past (e.g. Fleming, 2017). Its implicit, arguably unintentional forms such as biased or prejudiced behavior, on the other hand, linger into the present (Kahn, 2017). Racism as such is not zealously denied nor trivialized as a lesser evil in this vision. The persistence of ‘negative stereotypes’ in a so-called post-racial environment is alternatively attributed to a relatively benign culturalism instead of outright hostility based on skin color. It may also result from unconscious, and yet socially conditioned, cognitive processes, instead of a motivated, established belief in a racial hierarchy. Such euphemisms reflect Bonilla-Silva’s (1996) observation about ‘mainstream idealist views’, which tend to boil down racism to a belief system. His points also resonate with what Kahn (2017: 68) calls ‘dumbing down of racism’, a certain unease regarding the association of discourses, practices and behaviors with racism, which is ‘reduced to its most explicit, virulent forms – forms stripped of all subtlety and nuance’.
Sociologists, legal scholars and political philosophers, especially in the tradition of critical race theory, object to this reduction on several grounds. It is suggested that racism is not confined to ideas and individual expressions of racial superiority and inferiority, whose legitimacy have gradually eroded in the vocabulary of the social and political mainstream since World War II. Rather, racism continues to penetrate into social structures and institutions that systematically reproduce privileges for some (whites) and disadvantages for others (non-whites) (Bonilla-Silva, 2015; Mills, 2017). Policies that promote the complete erasure of race as a social category (e.g. Sweden), as it is no longer justifiable on a scientific and normative basis, contribute to (color-)blindness to the social reality of race in various spheres of public life including criminal justice (e.g. Lipsitz, 2011). Hence, conceptualizing racism merely in terms of downright hatred paves the way for racial ‘dismissal’ (Goldberg, 2015), in such a way that it ‘renders opaque the structures making possible and silently perpetuating racially ordered power and privilege’ (pp. 29–30).
Insights from this literature may inform a more nuanced understanding of the premises as well as limitations in regard to the normative implications of enforcing laws against racial (and other faces of) hatred. In turn, this may also help us conceptualize minorities’ specific experiences with the policing of racial hatred. The concept of hate crime is one of main tools at the repository of modern states to mitigate the social harms of racism. Legal definitions vary as to which acts count as hate crime (Bleich, 2011). One may commonly refer to sentence aggravations and penalty enhancements for criminal offenses that are motivated by hostility, bias or prejudice against the perceived identity or group belonging of the victim (Laverick and Joyce, 2019). In doing so, the state, at least in a symbolic sense, recognizes the harms inflicted upon the victims selectively due to the visible or perceived markers of their identity, signals that the targeted identity, group or community is protected, and takes a step toward social inclusion (Mason, 2014a: 296). The purpose of hate crime statutes at the outset was to redress the harms specifically suffered by members of racial, ethnic and religious minorities as historically subordinated groups (Perry, 2002). Therefore, one of the virtues of such legal instruments, as Mason (2014b) describes, is that they utilize the means of penal justice for the sake of social justice.
Notwithstanding these normative implications, theoretical discussions on hate crimes are replete with what I would call liberal conundrums. First, some scholars suggest a conceptual expansion in the definition of hate crime victimhood, along the notion of difference (Garland and Chakraborti, 2012). Particular attention is given to previously neglected victimization of the disabled, the homeless and sexual workers – categories of people who are not traditionally regarded as ‘communities’ (e.g. Garland, 2012). Questions abound, though, as to which ‘differences’ should count as deserving affirmation from the state (Mason, 2014b). Second, arguments for regulating hate speech and criminalizing hatred do not remain uncontested either. Liberal philosophers such as Jeremy Waldron (2012) point to the ‘assurances’ that a well-ordered society should provide against hate speech and group defamation to uphold human dignity and public good. Free speech absolutists, on the other hand, interpret such interventions as illegitimate restrictions on individual liberty and autonomy (Jacobs and Potter, 1998; Strossen, 2018). Third, most justifications of hate crime laws build on the assumption that expressions of hatred cause (additional) harms (Iganski, 2001). Such reasoning is in congruence with the harm principle that John Stuart Mill (1982 [1859]) famously formulated in On Liberty. Seen from another angle, to deal with hatred ‘litigiously’ have its own pitfalls, as Brown (1995: 27–28) argues, because ‘injury is thereby rendered individual and intentional, politics is reduced to punishment, and justice is equated with such punishment on the one hand and with protection by the courts on the other’.
Backed by objections from critical race theory on conventional wisdom about racism, I would like to raise a fourth conundrum, which may circumscribe the prospect of social justice articulated in theoretical justifications of hate crime. In many jurisdictions the enforcement of hate crime provisions is predicated on proving demonstrable, even measurable, individual hostility, motive or prejudice (Bleich, 2011; Walters, 2014). This more or less established approach seems to square with ‘mainstream idealist views’, which cement a conception of racism as ‘irrational’ and ‘rigid’. Accordingly, ‘its manifestations should be quite evident, usually involving some degree of hostility’, and it is ‘characteristic of individuals who are “racist” or “prejudiced”’ (Bonilla-Silva, 1996: 467–469). As colorblindness endures, nevertheless, ‘most whites think of themselves as non-racists […] while still continuing to endorse racial, particularly anti-black stereotypes’ (Mills, 2017: 117), or ‘[g]enerally speaking, racist people do not think of themselves as racist’ (Kahn, 2017: 69). Not mysteriously, then, racial hatred is often understood, represented and investigated as sensational, extremist bigotry while its more mundane, less explicit forms are shunted aside (Lewis, 2013). This conundrum might, at least partially, may help us unpack the bewildering experiences of racially targeted people with the policing of hate crimes.
Policing Racism and Legal Estrangement
The sociological relevance of lived experiences with police work against racism lies also in the fact that most targets of racial hatred are members of minority populations whose relationship with the police in general is often haunted by tense encounters and vulnerabilities, not least in Sweden (Mulinari, 2019; Solhjell et al., 2019). Normative attributes of hate crime law enforcement, i.e. the premise of social inclusion, are thus complicated, if not wholly undermined, due to the perceived perils that minorities and communities of color might associate with recourse to the police. To further grasp in what ways previous interactions with the police may shape individual and collective experiences with the policing of racism, therefore, it makes sense to expand our conceptual repertoire adding to the discussion above.
In fact, extant literature shows that in the last couple of decades, policy and policing fields regarding hate crimes have grown particularly in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In a number of countries at least, progress has been noted compared to what has been previously found about the predominant indifference of police forces to racist victimization (Bowling, 1998; Boyd et al., 1996). Research indicates notable variations in the reporting and recording of racist and other hate-related offenses, operational procedures, and preferential and even biased treatment of victims (Bell, 2002; Hall, 2012; Mason and Stanic, 2019; Walters, 2014).
However, law enforcement response to hate crimes continues to be hampered by persistent issues across boundaries. A striking finding is that hate crimes are less likely to be investigated and prosecuted compared to crimes not driven by bigotry (Mason et al., 2016). Incidents of hatred, several studies confirm, are still under-reported to the police (Pezzella et al., 2019; Wiedlitzka et al., 2018). That the victims of racism are afraid of retaliation, unfamiliar with hate crimes as a notion, or caught up in fatigue due to the everyday nature of racist intimidation might explain the shared reluctance to contact the police. Under-reporting is nonetheless often related to the lived experiences with policing. Most cases tend to be dismissed, thereby reinforcing the belief that reporting the incident would lead nowhere. It is also a widespread perception that the police downplay racism or fail to respond to the claims about racist offending with dignity and respect (Chakraborti, 2018; Hardy and Chakraborti, 2020). Some scholars offer practical, concrete guidelines for a more ‘effective’ policing of hatred, ranging from genuine community engagement and conceptual clarity surrounding hate, hostility and prejudice, to improved education, training and reforms in occupational culture (Chakraborti, 2018; Hall, 2012; Mason and Stanic, 2019). From a more critical standpoint, failure to recognize may also have to do with what Ahmed (2012) defines as ‘non-performative’, referring to institutional inertia embodying diversity and inclusion. ‘When anti-racism provides a discourse of organizational pride’, she argues, ‘then racism is not recognized and is enacted in the mode of nonrecognition’ (p. 145).
In this respect, the concept of legal estrangement recently elaborated by Monica C. Bell (2017) can be useful to broaden analytical perspectives on how personal and vicarious victims of racist offending may collectively experience recourse to police. Bell introduces this concept to explicate the experiences of disadvantaged communities of color with law enforcement. In her structural critique of legitimacy- and procedural justice-oriented proposals for police reform, Bell proposes legal estrangement by building on, and contesting previous scholarship on legal cynicism. Sampson and Bartusch (1998) defined legal cynicism as ‘anomie about law’ and societal rules emanating from neighborhood-level concentrated disadvantage, which overlaps with racial segregation. Subsequent research adopted legal cynicism to examine its various manifestations, and advanced rigorous cultural arguments about the perceived unresponsiveness of the agents of criminal justice (Carr et al., 2007; Kirk and Papachristos, 2011).
Bell’s (2017) account of legal estrangement, while acknowledging anomie about law as a cultural orientation, more trenchantly attends to structural processes that generate and reproduce cynicism. By structural she refers both to conditions as racism, segregation and poverty, and to lived experiences with policing as a group or as a community. Rather than primarily frame cynicism as attitudinal outcome or subjective feeling, furthermore, legal estrangement pays more attention to ‘collective, cumulative experience of procedural and substantive injustice’ (Bell, 2017: 2105). The objective of justice with respect to policing, Bell maintains, lies in social inclusion instead of ‘thin conceptions of procedural justice’ (p. 2082). This assertion echoes MacCoun’s (2005) review of procedural justice as ‘an inexpensive way to coopt citizens and distract them from outcomes that by normative criteria might be considered unfair or biased’ (p. 189).
There are at least two reasons as to why this paper would benefit from the theoretical premises of legal estrangement. First, since the vast majority of hate incidents victimize racial minorities, their personal and vicarious experiences with policing are worth examining from the vantage point of estrangement. Second, the purpose of hate crime legislation and its enforcement is formulated by normative accounts as social inclusion. Such a postulation resonates with the objective of justice enshrined in legal estrangement perspective described above. In this light, the discussion below bridges critical thinking on racism with the conceptual repertoire of legal estrangement. The following section outlines the Swedish case as the empirical locus of this study.
The Swedish Scene
On resurgence of racism in Europe at the end of the twentieth century, Allan Pred (2000) wrote that ‘racisms are flourishing even in Sweden, a country long stereotyped […] as a paradise of social enlightenment, as an international champion of social justice, as the model of solidarity and equality, as the world’s capital of good intentions and civilized behavior towards others’ (p. 6). ‘Even’, put in italics, is telling about the image and the self-image of Sweden, to which racism had long been considered as unfitting, despite its documented history involving eugenics and transatlantic slave trade (e.g. Ripenberg, 2019). The growing literature on race and racism in Sweden unsettles this image and lays bare the prevailing colorblind discourse in the country (e.g. Hübinette, 2017a; Hübinette and Wasniowski, 2018; Jonsson, 2004).
Some researchers contrast Sweden’s outspoken determination to publicly denounce egentlig 2 racism with its silent consensus not to pinpoint racialized social hierarchies and structures (Brännström, 2018; Jonsson, 2004). That the population statistics does not comprise data on racial or ethnic background, others claim, obfuscates the possibility to explore the experienced meanings of various minority positions and mechanisms of ostracization in society (Hübinette, 2017b). Avoidance of a race talk, because it is accepted as illegitimate and unwarranted, reflects also on political efforts to erase the phrase ‘race’ entirely from legal texts so that it can be substituted, if necessary, by terms as ‘ethnic belonging’ or ‘skin color’ (Brännström, 2018: 21–22). That rising skepticism about, and opposition to, (non-white) immigration has been increasingly framed in terms of insurmountable ‘cultural differences’ is similarly explained as an indication of an entrenched colorblind discourse (Dahlstedt and Lozic, 2017; Mulinari and Neergard, 2018).
Recent studies also shed light on the uneasy relationship between the police and members of racial and ethnic minorities in Sweden. Involuntary encounters with the police on the street seem to be a relatively frequent and distressing experience for certain groups such as Afro-Swedes, Muslims and Roma, who share frustrations about police suspicion and being approached as a potential perpetrator or a suspect of terrorism (Mulinari, 2019). Minority youth, it is also observed, tends to associate police stops with neighborhood stigmatization – a process of labeling which feeds into a sense that they are perceived by the police as a threat to the majority population (Solhjell et al., 2019; Wästerfors and Burcar Alm, 2020). In this context, it would be a significant contribution to scrutinize ‘voluntary’ interactions with the police due to racist victimization.
While official statistics specifically on ethnic or racial background is not available, population registry includes data on one’s own and parents’ country of birth. Even though it is thereby difficult to map ethnic demography in Sweden, country of birth is often used as a proxy for distinctions between European and non-European background. 3 Due to their long history on the Swedish interior, certain groups are recognized as ‘national’ or official minorities including Jews, Roma, Sami, Finnish Swedes and Tornedalians (SFS, 2009: 724). Ethnic and racial diversity in Sweden have been growing in the last several decades, and as of 2019, immigration has been accounted as the largest factor contributing to population growth (SCB, 2020). Unofficial estimations, albeit limited, might still be a useful source to garner information about the size of particular minorities in the country. The number of Afro-Swedes, for instance, has also been rising and estimated to have reached about two-three percent of the population (Afrosvenskarnas riksförbund, n.d.)
As in many jurisdictions hate crime in Sweden is foremost articulated as a sentence aggravation clause, yet as an umbrella term it also comprises unlawful discrimination and incitement of hatred against people (Granström et al., 2016). Hate crime as a term started to take root in Sweden in the 1990s initially through media attention to anti-Arab incidents in the USA (Brax, 2019: 37), and thanks to pioneering scholarly work in the field (Tiby, 1999). Since 1994 crimes that are motivated to intimidate someone on the basis of his/her ‘race, color of skin, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation or a similar condition’ (Penal Code, Chapter 29, Section 2 § 7) are liable to sentence aggravation. Hate crime statistics are regularly published by the National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), based on police reports and victimization surveys. Figures from these statistics since the early 2000s show that the majority of hate crimes has racist grounds. Racist hate is divided in subcategories ‘Afrophobic’, ‘anti-Roma’ and ‘other racist/xenophobic’, with the last one being the largest category. ‘Anti-semitic’, ‘Islamophobic’, ‘Christophobic’ and ‘other anti-religious’ hate crimes are listed as individual categories. Almost half of the more than 4000 hate crimes with a racist motive reported to the police in 2016 are dismissed directly, while an equal proportion is dismissed after an investigation. 4 Latest figures also indicate that racial hatred seldom involves physical violence but more often offenses such as unlawful threat, defamation and molestation (Brå, 2019).
The Swedish government in 2014 mandated the police to prioritize hate crimes as problem area (Polisen, 2017). The national police authority currently has specialized units in three largest cities of the country (Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö), and individual officers with extra competences in other regions to investigate hate crimes. Since hate crime units and specialized officers do not directly receive incident reports, frontline personnel as well as the phone-contact center of the police play an important role in the early detection of hate crimes. Despite avowed growth in organizational capacity in recent years, however, studies cast doubts about the effectiveness of hate crime policing due to issues such as confusions about the identification of bias (Shoultz, 2015), or an institutional commitment more concerned about positive self-portrayal than delivering outcomes (Holgersson, 2018).
Methodology
Empirically, the current study draws on interviews with people who have first-hand and/or vicarious experiences with policing as a result of a racist victimization. The working definition of racist victimization used throughout the inquiry is derived from the concept of (racist) hate crime in the literature cited above. For this study, I relied on the respondents’ own account that they perceived the incidents in their narratives as racially motivated crime regardless of whether those acts were registered as hate crime. The reason as to why people with vicarious experiences are included is twofold. First, victims of racial hatred can be considered as a hard-to-reach population, a difficulty, which also affected the selection of the interviewees for this research as I elaborate further below. Second, vicarious experiences might be revealing about what Bell (2017) calls ‘cultural contagiousness of criminal justice contact’, through acquaintances, friends and family members, thereby telling about the collective experiences of a community.
With this justification in mind, I interviewed 19 people with diverse racial/ethnic background in four different cities in Sweden, between late 2017 and early 2020. More specifically, the sample is comprised of Blacks or Afro-Swedes (nine), followed by Roma (three), Muslims with a Middle Eastern origin (two), Jews (two), people who have a South American background (two), and one ethnic Swede. 5 Such a disparate sample bears advantages but also notable limitations. Racial hatred is multifaceted and targets communities whose relative position in society differs from each other in structural and historical terms. Finding convergent and divergent patterns in the narratives of the interviewed would therefore give important hints about the shared experiences with the policing of racial hatred across different communities. From an intersectional perspective, furthermore, such a sample may allow making tentative observations about crosscutting identities such as being Black and Muslim, and see in what ways they interact with each other. Nevertheless, the size and configuration of the sample renders it hard to disentangle experiences that are peculiar to particular collective identities in comparison to each other. Focusing on non-White or non-majority status only thus risks overlooking group-specific processes of meaning construction as well as structural factors that impinge on these processes.
In order to establish myself in the field I tried multiple points of entry. At the earlier stages I contacted victim support associations, which could possibly play a mediating role in my access to the people who have been racially victimized in a recent past. Due to ethical issues related to confidentiality, associations that responded to my formal request were unable to provide much assistance for my inquiry. Most of the participants who agreed to be interviewed were recruited through minority associations, including youth organizations of ethnic and religious minorities, and civil society initiatives that embrace an anti-racist agenda. Through these channels I intended to reach people who may want to participate in the study. Still, this process evolved more complicatedly than I expected. Snowballing strategy worked for some cases but not in others, even though several respondents showed willingness to contribute with further contacts. I also announced information about my research on a few Facebook pages attentive to racism, for those who might have relevant experiences and be interested in participation. This proved to be of little avail. Being disinclined to participate may, among other things, have to do with the fact that racist victimization and its policing are sensitive questions to talk about with an academic stranger. On the other hand, several interviewees shared their enthusiasm because racist victimization is an urgent question to talk about.
To deal with these dilemmas I further consulted colleagues with a more insider position, which helped me build rapport with people who were otherwise difficult to reach. I thus managed to create a convenience sample composed of people with personal and/or vicarious experiences this research aims to unravel. Such a convenience sample might be skewed in the sense that the narratives told by the respondents may only give a partial, perhaps even too similar, if not simply one-sided, picture. While it is a formidable challenge to overcome such a constraint, it is also reasonable to assume that the multiple channels that I used for access enabled gathering different perspectives into the subject of this study.
The respondents have diverse occupational background ranging from teachers, hourly employees, students, case officers and so forth. Age of the respondents varies also markedly: eight being under 30, six between 30 and 49, and five being 50 or older. In terms of gender the distribution is slightly skewed as 12 of the respondents are male, whereas only 7 of them are female. While it would be difficult to draw extensive inferences based on these axes of differentiation, some parts of the transcribed material may be reasonably read through the lenses of age, gender and even class. The duration of the interviews was on average 45 minutes. The physical setting of our meetings was mostly cafes, workplaces and the facilities of associations, while I also conducted two interviews online and via phone. I met the respondents on a one-to-one basis, except for two cases where the setting was a group interview. On one occasion, moreover, an interpreter was present to translate the communication between myself and the respondent. I informed the interviewees about the objectives of the study as well as their rights as research participants. With the consent of the respondents, I recorded and transcribed the interviews. To ascertain anonymity, I removed markers of identification (e.g. names and places) from the textual document. 6 The names that appear in the results are therefore pseudonyms.
Interviews were semi-structured that allowed flexibility and follow-up questions. More specifically, I asked the interviewees about their personal and vicarious experiences with racist victimization, their reactions to the incidents, their contact, relationship with, and perceptions about the police and how the incidents were handled by the police. I focused on these key questions in my close-reading of the material that I coded first loosely and then by identifying interlocking themes more specifically. This resulted in three main themes that I present in results.
Admittedly, interviews are not mechanistic exchanges of words but scenes of human interaction susceptible to differential social positions between the researcher and the respondent, as well as to the preconceptions of the former. Being a researcher with a non-European background, recently moved to Sweden and speaking an imperfect Swedish, for that matter, might have facilitated developing a reciprocal empathy in the course of the interviews. However, a reflexive sociology, as Bourdieu (in Wacquant, 1989) reminds, requires not only self-awareness about class, race/ethnicity or gender but more than so, not to fall into the ‘ethnocentrism of the scientist’, that is, ‘ignoring everything that the analyst injects in his [sic] perception of the object’ (p. 34) and that s/he looks through a ‘contemplative eye’. In this sense, my academic gaze is guided by Becker’s (1967) defense of sociological ‘bias’ against the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ in social order, where ‘knowledge of truth and the right to be heard are not equally distributed’ (p. 242). Becker takes issue with claims of bias against social research that draws attention to the voices of the marginalized, challenging institutional authorities’ statements of truth. The analysis below endorses a similar approach and is substantiated by the conceptual tools introduced above.
Resentful Reliance on the Police
Lived experiences with racist victimization and its policing yield overlapping as well as contrasting narratives throughout the interviews. Some respondents share a strong sense of alienation from the police as an institution. Such totalizing police skepticism often has to do with accumulated experiences with law enforcement, personal or vicarious, not just tied to the handling of racist victimization. Others, while having firm doubts about whether policing of racial hatred brings about desirable outcomes, do not describe their views about the police in solely antagonistic terms. On a micro-level, variation in respondents’ attributes about policing may originate from the nature of a particular experience, yet on a macro-level differences can be linked to structural-collective meanings of being a Black, Roma, Muslim, Jew and so forth, in Sweden.
It is worth noting that hardly any respondent disputed the virtues of hate crime as a punitive instrument for social inclusion, though some were wary of its limited capacity as a means to tackle racism in society. What seems to be consolidated, in line with the literature, is the internalization that reporting a racist incident to the police would most likely lead to nowhere. Many respondents perceive that acts of racist targeting often remain unrecognized in the event of police involvement. The experience of nonrecognition, I claim, can be construed by reference to the reductionism that critical race scholarship disputes as ‘dumbing down of racism’. I also argue that frustrations with the policing of racial hatred, seen as a benevolent or futile effort, lay the ground for legal estrangement, not simply as subjective attitude toward the police but as a lived experience, which erodes senses of belonging and recognition. Furthermore, recourse to police in case of a racist incident is still considered as necessary even for those disillusioned with law enforcement – a phenomenon I call resentful reliance. Similar versions of this seeming paradox have been noted in previous research on legal cynicism (e.g. Bell, 2016; Carr et al., 2007; Zaykowski et al., 2019). Indeed, estrangement does not preclude willingness to comply with and resorting to the police. In the following subsections I develop these thoughts by going through three interwoven themes I identified in the empirical material.
Contesting Unseen Racism
Throughout the interviews most respondents describe their experience with police treatment in somewhat positive terms. Police officers are generally portrayed as polite and respectful, even though a few individual officers are pointed out as unhelpful, unresponsive or having lack of understanding. Many respondents nonetheless assert that being victimized due to skin color, Roma or Muslim ‘outlook’ is seldom considered as ‘sufficiently’ racist and the policing of racial hatred is experienced, to recall Ahmed’s (2012: 26) analogy, as a ‘wall’.
Diego, a biology student in his twenties, was attacked in a train station by a male offender, who physically assaulted him and yelled ‘Are you a disgusting Arab?’. Patrolling police officers arrived and arrested the offender rather quickly. For Diego, who actually has a South American background,
7
it felt quite long until he received a police report, which made him confused as there was no mentioning of hate crime. After a while, detectives came to visit and asked questions about the incident. Diego got the impression that they were more eager to investigate other crimes the offender was apparently involved than his own case. Both patrolling officers and detectives, Diego says, were respectful and seemed professional. However, the hate motive was omitted in the prosecution of the offender, who refused being a racist. I asked Diego how this process influenced his view about the police: Well, it didn’t affect my view about the police as it felt like if anything would happen to me they will still help me. But it affected my sense of how this question is taken seriously. How do they interpret hate crime? How far should things go so that it becomes a hate crime? It can feel like, as I don’t look like a typical Swedish person, how would it be handled if something similar happens to me again […] I wonder whether one needs to be overtly racist [emphasis added] for something to be classified as hate crime. I think the assumption that something negative will happen, a feeling many of us have, is greater than the risk that something negative will happen. I believe in most cases today you get an okay treatment. It can be obviously difficult to identify hate motive in certain cases but the victim may also experience it as a loss if the motive is dismissed. Like “Wait a second! I understand that the offender is going to be prosecuted for violating the law regarding the use of knives but why not go further? Why drop the hate aspect just because the person says he didn’t have a racist motive?”. Something like that […] I believe white Swedes generally don’t think that racism is present if one does not more or less express it like “Now I hit you because…”. “Did you say something which provoked him?”, he asked and I said “No, I’ve never met this person. No clue about who he is. Even if I had known him, would it give him the right to threaten me to death?” He was like “Absolutely not. I’m just trying to understand”. I felt already that he was not willing to take my story the way I described and instead wanted to make changes in it […] When someone says something racist to me, they [the police] often interpret that this person was being rude. Not that he had a racist motive but he simply was rude. There are many rude people around and that’s why they dismiss such cases. That’s my impression. It’s not always blatant. You know the police want you to go there with [inaudible] maybe bleeding in the eye for them to really take action. But sometimes the bleeding is in the mind. […] The system is not that flexible. It asks something that I cannot give. It asks us for too much evidence, which I cannot give.
Accumulated Skepticism
Even though not all respondents are well-aware of hate crime legislation or the existence of hate crime task forces, most of them tend to favor a more prioritized, even tougher police response to the incidents of racial hatred. The racist motive itself, not just the severity of the offence, Vianney claims, needs to become a criterion for prioritization. ‘Perhaps one wouldn’t get more than a fine at the end but it is a very important signal…I mean, it is important for us’. However, it is noteworthy that demands for a stricter enforcement of hate crimes coexist with a persistent skepticism toward the policing of racial hatred, due to accumulated experiences not just tied to racist victimization but also to previous interactions with the police.
Matthias, a Swedish Jew in his sixties, has relatives and friends who have been victimized on the grounds of anti-Semitic hate. In one case, an extended family member has been verbally assaulted in a public place, the family reported the incident to the police, and the offender was sentenced to a fine. Matthias also told about an old friend, who has been racially harassed many times and notified the police more than once, albeit to little avail. On one occasion only, the police could identify the person who insulted Matthias’ friend from inside a car, and prosecutions followed. Based on his vicarious experiences Matthias admits the difficulty of enforcing hate crime laws and portrays the police as trying to be helpful and supportive. Still, he retains strong doubts about the anticipated outcomes of police work. I remember that they [the police] visited and told us about the legislation and I thought “That’s good! We can make use of it”. But then it proved to be quite toothless. I mean, as far as hate crimes are concerned, a stronger sentence follows when you convict someone with a hate motive. The statistics can be misleading though. People report hate crimes but then nothing happens. I can imagine that the next time you are exposed to something similar, you probably wouldn’t notify the police. It leads to nowhere if you know what I mean. I don’t think you can find or it is very difficult to find a single case, which involves Roma people as plaintiffs and where the dimension of hate crime is acknowledged […] Should you take the step and notify the police, then you need to draw attention to such a motive. But somewhere it doesn’t reach through the structures and it is difficult to push for it.
Omar’s narrative can be compared with what Vianney refers to as ‘being deprived and vulnerable from the onset’. Quite often, Vianney explains, Afro-Swedes whose experiences he is acquainted with come and tell gruesome stories, and their accounts of the police should be understood against the backdrop of an already disadvantaged position in society: Many Afro-Swedes are not among the most established in this society. They might be deprived and vulnerable in many ways. They might be the kind of people who come in contact with the police for different reasons. Thus they are looked upon as, you know what I mean, potential criminals, people who maybe use illegal substances or have done so sometime […] These people then describe how badly they were treated by the police when they have been subjected to [wrongdoing] and seen more as a problem. They were certainly not perceived as right-bearers. This is how I see the police authority. Half of it is amazing, consists of fantastic, well-hearted people doing their job. I don’t mean that it was the entire police force but probably one person who was behind the register. When something like this happens, you know someone does such a thing, it becomes bigger than that and many others are drawn into it. It affected the whole picture in the eyes of the Roma […] Since then confidence in the police ceased to exist. You know many people including my wife interpret for the police. She refuses to do it now.
Reliance for Recognition
Notwithstanding disenchantment with law enforcement, few respondents are wholly resigned and favor other means to redress their grievances about racist victimization. Most of the interviewed still consider resorting to the police as a legitimate authority for seeking justice. The decision to notify the police can be a question of strategic calculation, as Ahmad states, depending on the perceived likelihood of prosecution. Beyond strategic concerns, reporting a racist incident seems to be a peculiar form of claims-making, not just to be accepted as a victim but perhaps more importantly, to be recognized as a Black, Roma, Muslim or Jew, and included as dignified members of society.
Gulizar, a Swedish Muslim in her thirties, describes racism as ‘my everyday meal’. She notified the police about a life-threatening incident when she was assaulted on the street for being a ‘fucking Muslim’. The offender got convicted for molestation without a hate motive. Gulizar was convinced that she became a victim of a hate crime and reached out the police several times to follow her case closely. Her education in law and her work experience in the public sector, she explains, guided her in her communication with the police. She implies, in one sense, having a relative privilege: ‘I feel sorry for those who don’t have the possibility to express themselves well in Swedish, or who don’t have the same conditions like you and me, to be able to put things into fine words’. This reminds what Omar and Vianney assume about the experiences of the more disadvantaged members of the Afro-Swedish community. Gulizar’s impressions about the different police officers are rather ambivalent. While appreciating the empathetic reception from the interrogation officer, she observed indifference and lack of engagement at other officers. The police, she says, purport to be working hard against hate crimes ‘but in reality things look different’. She felt as if she were overburdening the police because of her repeated calls and queries. Some of her family members even discussed ‘other means’ to confront the offender. ‘I understand their frustration but I am totally against such things’, says Gulizar and adds: I had a sense of hopefulness as I knew that the police allocated resources to hate crime cases. I also heard from police officers that if you become a victim of hate crime you should definitely report it. So that it can be seen in the statistics blah blah blah […] My husband became very afraid though: “What if he is a psychopath and this gets worse? Who’s gonna protect us?” I said: “Yeah I know but I need to do this [reporting to the police] because I want to send a message to all those sisters who look like me: “You know what? We cannot be silent. We are part of this society. It shouldn’t be so easy that anyone comes and harasses us and gets away with it. We are at home here. We have contributed to the construction of Sweden just like others. This is our home. We should dare”. Even if it would be a burden in the system, I don’t give a shit. Even if the file will be dismissed. They have to register it in the system. I know that many people think like “I don’t have the energy. Why should I do it for them?”. No, you do it for us. Maybe when politicians see that hate crimes are increasing in this country, they may allocate more resources or maybe it becomes an important question. But if none of us report such incidents…People say “It still doesn’t lead anywhere” or “It takes so much time” and I tell them “I know, your report perhaps won’t change your situation today but you can change someone else’s in the future”. If there are scores of reporting to the police that do not lead to prosecution or anything, then it is a question in itself. It is a way to actualize a problem [emphasis added]. What this is all about, in my experience, is to breed in our community a sense that our inherent qualities are worth something.
Conclusion
The narratives from the interviews demonstrate that racism is often experienced as unseen and hardly detectable as regards the policing of hate crimes. These experiences can be understood against the backdrop of ‘dumbing down of racism’ and ‘mainstream idealist views’, which tend to reduce racism to its most blatant forms overtly expressed through extremist bigotry. That racism is experienced as unseen can also be comprehended by reference to the pervasion of a colorblind discourse, in which racism as sensational, extraordinary and irrational is commonsensically denounced, yet ‘unintentional’, ‘unconscious’ bias is deemed not worse than cultural ignorance or prejudice. The fact that enforcement of hate crime laws is predicated on demonstrable, intentional and even self-claimed hostility thus fits more neatly into the idealist understandings of racism – a condition, which seems to underlie frustrations of people whose claims about racial victimization are seldom recognized. In this context, policing of racial hatred is perceived as a necessary, to some extent benevolent, but mostly futile effort.
The concept of legal estrangement helps extending this point to make sense of the respondents’ resentful reliance on the police given their personal and vicarious experiences with racist victimization. Legal estrangement derives from not just individual but also collective experiences that the agents of law enforcement are unresponsive and unable to meet community demands of security and protection. Estrangement is more than attitudinal and reproduced through structural processes that are conducive to racism and exclusion as a shared and lived experience. This is not to suggest that racist victimization, just as interactions with the police, are experienced identically across different minority groups and communities. Neither can communities be readily thought as monolithic entities in themselves. It may be argued, as some respondents claim, that estrangement is more conspicuous among the less privileged, more deprived and vulnerable members within each community. Lived experiences might also be differentiated, as it is partially implied in the results, depending on diverse constellations of the racial with age (e.g. Black and young) or gender (e.g. Muslim and woman). Future work may more scrupulously delve into such patterns from an intersectional perspective. On a common ground, though, legal estrangement is apposite to the articulated resentments at the police, directly or indirectly linked to racist victimization.
As discussed above, the perceived unseeing of the racial in selective targeting can be lived as a loss and nonrecognition, even if prosecutions follow after a registered offence, and even if one receives a respectful police treatment. Previous interactions with the police as a racialized victim or a suspect community also pave the way for an entrenched skepticism toward the utility of hate crime policing as a means for social inclusion. However, accumulated frustrations rarely lead to a complete resignation from the police or a search for alternative avenues for redress. There is a resilient, if not so much willing, reliance on the police, which is deemed necessary for making a claim to be seen and recognized more than a victim. This contradiction is unsurprising and in congruence with legal estrangement as one may be alienated from the agents of law enforcement and simultaneously resort to them as legitimate authority.
This paper provided a micro-sociological perspective to the lived experiences with the policing of racist hate in Sweden, and brought together concepts and discussions from different literatures that not too often meet each other in previous research. Policing racial hatred is obviously a vexed question and can be addressed from multiple scholarly traditions. Borrowing ideas from critical race theory as well as legal estrangement, this paper contributes to interdisciplinary reflections on the promise and limits of social inclusion through penal interventions. Indeed, while there might be less doubt about the normative aspects of law enforcement response to racist offending that, in principle, would foster social inclusion, empirical indications of inclusion delivered by police work are not unambiguous, if not simply chimeric. For that matter, findings of this study lend weight to the scholarly views that procedural justice and legitimacy based approaches need to be complemented by a substantial justice perspective as a more holistic approach to policing.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Anita Heber, Jasmine Kelekay and Fredrik Sivertsson for their valuable comments on previous versions of this paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research is funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenkapsrådet) project grant (2016-04660).
