Migrant-Hostile Policing

Abstract

This chapter opens with three arrest cases that shed light on the non-modular constitution of present-day policing. Modularity is here understood as the segmentation of social life into separate and relatively independent spheres. The three vignettes show what happens when policing becomes non-modular: private and public considerations are blurred in the operations that police officers undertake. The rest of the chapter adds ethnographic materials collected in various settings to argue that this organizational development turns racial profiling, and migrant-hostile policing more broadly, into an everyday affair. One conclusion is emphasized repeatedly: police discrimination is a public issue that concerns the entire organization rather than an outcome of the private troubles of the individuals it employs.