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Geopolicing Race, Gender, and
Class: How the Police Immobilise
Urban Allochthones
Sinan C
ßankaya
Department of Public Administration and Political Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands;
s.cankaya@vu.nl
Abstract: City landscapes are ever-changing stages for the protagonists that pass
through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses to positively and negatively code
subjects. As such, geography matters to the body. Rather than taking geographic loca-
tions, crime statistics, predictive maps and human bodies as objective truths, I focus on
the work of police officers, not in terms of an instrumental-rational “meeting of policy
targets”or attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make raced, gendered
and classed geographical differentiations. This process culminates in geopolicing: the
spatial imaginations and practices of police officers as to who, what and where to police
and, of course, why. Geopolicing includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of
urban “matter out of place”. Police officers perceive exclusionary territories in which
landscapes racialised as white and identified as affluent are threatened by urban
allochthones identified by class, race, gender, age and residential status. The findings are
based on my ethnography among police officers in the city of Amsterdam, The Nether-
lands, between 2007 and 2011.
Keywords: police organisation, racial profiling, spatial exclusion, race and class, raciali-
sation, intersectionality
Introduction
Racialised policing has gained prominence on European and Dutch research agen-
das (C
ßankaya 2012; Fassin 2013; Mutsaers 2014; Peterson and
Akerstr€
om 2014;
Van der Leun and Van der Woude 2011). In the Netherlands, the decades-long link-
ing of “culture”to “crime”—and currently “religion”to “terrorism”—explains how
ethnic and religious minority communities are framed as suspect and risky. It leads
to the following, rather plain observations: Lady Justice is peeking through her
blindfold; our liberal institutions still see race, class and gender, while the police are
more interested in the appearance than the actual practice of neutrality.
This paper ventures beyond criticism of racialised policing. As critical social
geographers have proposed, one way to do so is to examine the production of
securitised urban landscapes. The social order is increasingly governed through
spatial practices of separation, displacement and exclusion (Ericson and Haggerty
1997). For instance, the old ban on movement and entry is re-emerging (Beckett
and Herbert 2010:3) as more and more “prohibited areas”(gebiedsverboden in
Dutch) seek to become safe havens by excluding deviant others. Another example
Antipode Vol. 0 No. 0 2020 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 1–20 doi: 10.1111/anti.12613
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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
A Radical Journal
of Geography
beyond policing is the privatisation of public space with Dutch equivalents of
gated communities: apartment complexes with a defensive architecture such as
high fences and bushes (Hellinga 2005), enclosed courtyards, and communities
that have access to exclusive amenities such as swimming pools and gyms (Aal-
bers 2003). Police stops play into this by relegating residential outsiders to certain
areas of the city, undermining feelings of belonging and citizenship, and by crimi-
nalising specific groups (Loader 2006). As one of the street-level bureaucracies of
our democratic constitutional state (see Lipsky 1980), the police play a role in
resisting, but also in reproducing inequalities in mobility and citizens’access to
specific parts of the city.
Harvey (1996:207) argues that “space and time are constituted by, as well as
constitutive of, social relations and practices”. Building on this premise, another
theoretical avenue is to examine the production of urban landscapes intersection-
ally, particularly their conflation with race, gender and class differentiations. I take
as axiomatic that urban spaces represent intersecting forms of social—and thus
power—relations in society (Mitchell 2002), and along the lines of Doreen Massey
(1994:177), geography matters to gender, class and race.
Whether and how the production of urban landscapes is subsumed within the
governance of spatial security remains a gap in our empirical knowledge. In spa-
tial analyses, attention is directed to the everyday meanings, spatial representa-
tions and practices of social actors (Lefebvre 1991), in my case police officers. A
particular aim of this paper is to contribute to debates on the spatial forms of
race, gender and class. While the relations of race, gender and class on the one
hand, and the body on the other has been studied extensively, we know less
about its interconnections to everyday spatial practices (see Delaney 2002; Lipsitz
2007). Rather than taking the body as the foundation of analysis, I prioritise the
spatial practices in which bodies are imbued with meaning. This analytical shift
goes beyond mere semantics, as it may yet force critical scholars to resist unnec-
essarily freezing raced, gendered, and classed categories. Second, I ask how exclu-
sionary practices are related to the spatialised governance of security. In doing so,
Iflesh out their connections to the political economy of private property, as well
as to the neoliberal governance of a global, “creative”metropole through urban
restructuring and gentrification (El-Tayeb 2012).
To foreground race, gender, class, and other relevant markers in our analysis
of policing, I propose the concept of the urban allochthone. Imaginaries of the
urban allochthone mainly concern the urban poor: men from ethnicised and
racialised minority groups, not-quite-white Central and Eastern Europeans as well
as some parts of the “white”working class, homeless people, and beggars. The
figuration of the urban allochthone not only destabilises spatial meanings in the
city but challenges current Dutch policy, media and academic usages of the
term “allochthones”defined exclusively in nativist, ethnicised and racialised
terms. State agencies categorise allochthones as people of whom at least one
parent is born outside of the Netherlands. Spatiality is related to alterity, I argue,
as raced, gendered and classed spaces, and the figure of the urban allochthone
mutually co-construct each other, informing concrete practices of separation,
displacement and containment in neighbourhoods. This process culminates in
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geopolicing, referring to the interconnections between geographic imaginations,
representations and practices of, in this case, police officers as to who, what
and where to police and, of course, why. These ideas and practices on which
milieus to defend and whose mobility to contain, arise precisely in the interac-
tion between spaces on the one hand, and urban allochthones on the other, as
I will show ethnographically.
The empirical findings are based on ethnographic research (C
ßankaya 2012) in
the Amsterdam police force between 2007 and 2011. My main research methods
were participant observation (including 200 hours of observing 25 beat patrols
throughout the city), the ethnographic interview (59 in-depth interviews in total)
and thousands of hours of informal conversation—I was after all officially
employed by the police organisation. The main aim of the ethnographic inter-
views (Spradley 1979) was to find out the why behind the daily routines of street
cops. The focus was on their reconstruction of past events—narratives of which I
did not accept at face value; I refer here to the discrepancy between what people
say and what they actually do (Deutscher 1973).
All in all, this paper examines how mundane police work is central to the regu-
lation of mobility in urban spaces. The spatial practices of police officers not only
reflect but produce social relations. This production of space cannot be reduced
to mere symbolism, metaphor or representation, as the power differentials
between the police—the wielders of state power—and citizens mean that policing
practices have material consequences for everyday life in the city of Amsterdam.
This leaves us with questions we cannot avoid in ethical discussions of justice:
Whose city? Whose mobility? And whose feelings of safety and security?
Spatial Interventions
The logic of risk, prevention and security manifests itself in different institutions
and spaces in modern society. Referring to the Foucauldian governmentality liter-
ature, Shearing (2001:203) characterises this development as the governance of
security. With his neologism of gouvernementalit
e, Foucault (2009) spoke of an
infrastructure of legitimations, techniques and procedures to govern society.
Building on this tradition, Rose (1996:328) defines governmentality as “the delib-
erations, strategies, tactics and devices employed by authorities for making up
and acting upon a population and its constituents to ensure good and avert ill”.
More broadly, governance strategies have shifted from straightforward physical
punishment to disciplinary techniques that regulate behaviour. In our era, the
state intervenes mainly at the level of the general population—a way of exercising
power that Foucault (2008, 2009) termed “biopolitics”, the regulation of every-
day life through governance techniques such as statistics to improve health and
hygiene, but also safety and security (see O’Malley 1992).
Governmentality has a spatial component. In Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary
systems such as schools and prisons, the body is disciplined into obedience
through surveillance techniques in time and space (Schuilenburg 2012:100).
Modern spatial strategies, however, have a different emphasis than disciplinary
techniques that seek to transform deviant behaviour. Spatial governmentality
Geopolicing Race, Gender, and Class 3
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(Merry 2001; Perry 2000) governs territories by isolating, disposing, excluding
and banning potentially “suspicious”and “risky”individuals (Bauman 2000; Beck-
ett and Herbert 2010; Low 2011). It aims to create spaces where citizens can
safely live, work, play and consume by excluding, deterring and incapacitating
deviants, not by transforming deviance as such. This is not to say that the deviant
is to be excluded from society in for instance prisons, as the Dutch probation ser-
vice is mainly centred on reintegration into society.
Modern security programs are often animated by the neoliberal logic of con-
sumption, protection of property and market-oriented growth (Bayley and Shear-
ing 1996; Neely and Samura 2011). Consider the shopping mall, whose purpose
is to guard profit, production and consumption, and where visitors are expected
to behave in specific ways. Private security guards, and sometimes police officers,
remove homeless people, beggars and youths—groups that do not meet the
expectations of consumption and who can hinder and deter other consumers.
The spatial ordering of the mall is based primarily on neo-liberal principles of gov-
ernmentality with a crucial place for freedom of choice, consumption and per-
sonal responsibility (Merry 2001; Rose 1996). Power is not merely coercive and
oppressive; the strategies of the state and technologies of the self work together,
leading people to self-eject themselves from certain places in the city.
Policing Risk
Growing performance pressure since the 1970s has led to the emergence of pre-
ventative strategies within the police organisation. Traditional “reactive”police
work focused on specific perpetrators and investigating criminal offenses, with
police actions following citizen requests. Johnston and Shearing (2003) depict this
as reflecting the “punishment mentality”of criminal law: the perpetrator must be
identified, arrested and brought to justice. But with the shift in policing from the
punishment of crimes to the containment of risks, a “risk mentality”increasingly
informs the new governance of security. Much of the focus today is on purifying
spaces where deviant and unlawful acts are rare (Von Hirsch and Shearing
2000:90).
Heightened feelings of insecurity, threat and risk come together in the “risk
society”(Beck 1992; Johnston and Shearing 2003), in which the calculation,
prediction, prevention and containment of security risks stand central (Feeley
and Simon 1994). Risk analyses gather large amounts of data and perform
complex statistical calculations to determine individual risks from group charac-
teristics. The risk perspective on fighting crime emerged as an answer to the
low judicial conviction rate as well as trends requiring better performance from
the police. The latter were informed by the discourse of “new public manage-
ment”in which institutional reforms of the public sector were needed to
improve “effectiveness”and to use government resources “efficiently”. The
police also faced shortages of investigative personnel; although the public
demand for security had grown, many cases remained unsolved (Boutellier
2002).
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The reactive police officer who was tragically, and by definition, always late,
now makes way for the proactive officer who wants to be there before the crime
takes place (Schinkel 2009). The distinction between reactive and proactive polic-
ing is far from clear-cut; nor are pre-crime policing methods historically novel.
Nevertheless, the division is analytically useful: proactive police stops are primarily
initiated by police officers to intervene in preventive as well as repressive ways
(C
ßankaya 2012:17). In other words, repressive powers are proactively applied to
prevent crime.
The Construction of Marginalised and Racialised Spaces
In what follows, I tease out the relationships between Dutch security discourses,
ideas on alterity and their relationship to urban spaces. In the Netherlands, hyper-
masculine migrants are central to Dutch safety and security discourses, exempli-
fied by the over-representation of minority youths in specific forms of visible
crime. More specifically, young Moroccan-Dutch men figure as “the key racialized
other”(De Koning 2017:539). Although racialised ideas about the Other have
always been historically present, race and ethnicity have grown more prominent
in discourses of alterity, laid atop considerations of class and poverty that served
to marginalise the poor, beggars and homeless people in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (Weber and Bowling 2008). In this paper, I aim at making
these articulations between race, gender and class more explicit.
Many supposedly general and neutral social policies target poor, mostly non-
white populations with migration backgrounds (Van Houdt and Schinkel 2013)—
policies with a spatialised dimension as public, political and media imaginaries
construct certain neighbourhoods as requiring state intervention. Smith’s (1996)
concept of urban revanchism describes the sentiment that marginalised groups
have hijacked spaces in the city where the state has lost authority and control. In
this revanchist discourse, the working class is identified as the cause of disorder,
of declining social cohesion and quality of life (Schinkel and Van den Berg 2011;
Uitermark 2003a). In Amsterdam, poor neighbourhoods are spatially stigmatised
and seen as iconic symbols of overlast, decay, danger and crime. De Koning
(2016) details this for the Diamantbuurt in Amsterdam-East, Balkenhol (2014) for
the Bijlmer in Amsterdam-Southeast, and Mepschen (2016) for Amsterdam-West.
Not coincidentally, these are all neighbourhoods with high numbers of allochto-
nen,officially meaning “not from this soil”who stand in opposition to authochto-
nen,“from this soil”, referring to white Dutch natives (see Duyvendak 2011;
Geschiere 2009; Van der Haar and Yanow 2011).
Tying the above together, these spatial representations on allochthones and
municipal policies of restructuring “problem areas”inform practices of geopolic-
ing: by intensifying surveillance in certain areas of the city and by focusing limited
police resources on groups portrayed as risky, the aim is to both police milieus in
the city that need safeguarding and others whose inhabitants have to be con-
tained (C
ßankaya 2012). I use policing in the sense of Ranci
ere (1994:173), detail-
ing “all the activities which create order by distributing places, names, functions”,
referring to different forms of urban governance, of which the police only form
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one specific agent. While geopolicing does target the purification of spaces, as
proposed by the notion of spatial governmentality, I do however include the
desire of police officers to withhold urban allochthones—who become possible
deviants in encounters with the police—from, again, possibly committing criminal
acts. Concrete unlawful acts are not necessary to draw this conclusion. There is,
as Von Hirsch and Shearing (2000:90) describe, usually an absence of “wrongful-
ness”in the pre-crime phase.
The analytical novelty of the urban allochthone accounts for a multitude of
deviant “others”, in essence it produces a different analysis to make sense of alter-
ity, risk and danger in its spatial forms: a dynamic and relational approach geared
to avoid unduly fixing categorical frameworks, while taking intersections of race,
gender and class serious. The notion forces a shift away from the substantialist
toward spatialised articulations and practices that produce “difference”, which are
always done and undone, made and unmade. Furthermore, the concept has
enough plasticity to be adapted to other empirical national, regional and local
contexts, as well as disciplinary fields.
Geopolicing accommodates ideas of urban allochthones within a spatial gov-
ernmentality, and entails the mapping, marking and production of racialised, gen-
dered and classed urban landscapes. Here, space is an “enabling technology”
(Delaney 2002) that not only produces race, class and gender distinctions, but
makes them conceivable, thinkable and knowable in the first place. In what fol-
lows I will show ethnographically that the proactive police stop is part and parcel
of geopolicing subpopulations, a way to order disorder, of governing mobility,
and of identifying, and then penalising not only racialised young men, but more
broadly—urban allochthones.
Space in Context: The City of Amsterdam
The case of Amsterdam, the capital and largest city of the Netherlands, is relevant
for three reasons. First, Amsterdam is a super-diverse city (Vertovec 2007) as white
“autochthonous”people no longer form the demographic majority.
1
A key fea-
ture of the city is the overlap of ethnicity and lower incomes; the interaction of
these variables might thus provide insight into specific forms of spatial inclusion/
exclusion in the super-diverse city. Second, seen internationally, Amsterdam is a
relatively undivided city. Compared to the spatial isolation of the French banlieues
and American “ghettos”, socio-spatial segregation in Amsterdam is limited (Uiter-
mark 2003b; Wacquant 2016). The intricate geographical structure of Amster-
dam’s neighbourhoods underscores the empirical importance of this case. Third,
the normative ideal of a unified city is a policy priority in Amsterdam (Hochsten-
bach and Mustard 2018). The fear of no-go areas plays an important role in pub-
lic discourse, and municipal policies since the 1990s have sought to create
socially mixed neighbourhoods (Uitermark and Duyvendak 2004). As a majority-
minority city, the case of Amsterdam stands for similar Western metropoles such
as Brussels, and begs the question how the production of space is conflated with
race and class against the backdrop of increasing super-diversity, conviviality and
limited ethnic segregation.
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There are only three neighbourhoods in Amsterdam where white “autochthonous”
Dutch people do not form the largest ethnic group, namely Bijlmer Centre, Bijlmer
East and De Kolenkit (Gemeente Amsterdam 2013). Of the 97 so-called “neighbour-
hood combinations”(buurtcombinaties) in Amsterdam, white Dutch people comprise
less than 50% of the population in 19 of them,
2
located mainly in the western dis-
tricts, New West, East, South and North (Gemeente Amsterdam 2013). Disadvan-
taged neighbourhoods, which are ethnically heterogeneous, are also often
economically heterogeneous, while white homogenous neighbourhoods are eco-
nomically homogenous, namely wealthy (Uitermark and Duyvendak 2004:16). These
areas are mainly located in the Centre, South and parts of East and North.
One explanation for economic heterogeneity in Amsterdam’s deprived neigh-
bourhoods is the municipal policy of urban restructuring, informed by the belief
that the (white) middle class promotes the quality of neighbourhood life. Gentrifi-
cation seeks to regain these areas by reducing crime, nuisance and vandalism.
To identify areas for urban restructuring, the municipality classifies neighbour-
hoods as “development”,“attention”and “base areas”(ontwikkelings-, aandachts-
en basisgebieden) (Gemeente Amsterdam 1999). The “development areas”cluster
in the city’s peripheral areas, in the districts of North, Southeast and New West;
the “attention”and “base areas”are located in and around the city centre (Uiter-
mark and Bosker 2014) and generally have strong market potential. Still, the
question remains whether the “neighbourhood”is a useful spatial scale for analy-
sis as those in “development”and “attention”areas have significant variation in
ethnicity and income at the level of streets (and sometimes even apartment com-
plexes on specific streets).
Bearing the Brunt of Everyday Risk
Police officers use many typologies in their daily practices. Examples include “tar-
get groups”,“machos”,“Easterners”,“piss stains”,“single-celled”,“posh peo-
ple”,“Negros”,“dealers”and “beggars”(C
ßankaya 2012). Some labels refer only
to ethnicity as a distinguishing criterion; others are a composition of different vari-
ables such as gender, age, lifestyle, social class, intellectual ability and attitude
towards the police. It should be noted that the term most used by Dutch police
—“target groups”(doelgroepen)—refers to marginalised youths with Moroccan,
Surinamese or Antillean ancestry, people from Central and Eastern Europe, and
parts of the “white”working class.
R: “It [the decision to stop someone] also depends on the target group. The guys
who are in the briefing, if someone is in the briefing and I think someone on the
streets looks like him then yes ... So I am selective, but also boys around the age of
16. And Surinamese and Antillean people.”
I: “So you’re also saying that you are influenced by someone’s age?”
R: Yes, it depends on the district I am in and someone’s colour. When I’m in West, I
will stop and search more Moroccans and if I am in the Southeast of Amsterdam more
Antilleans.”
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I: “And why is that?”
R: “If you look at our intelligence, the briefing, in the Western districts it’s only Moroc-
cans. They practically all look alike, but if I have one that looks like someone in the
briefing, then I will check it out.”
The police stop is a “race-making event”(Delaney 2002:10) in its spatial form,
cutting across gender, class and other markers. Police officers understand people
and neighbourhoods through demographic data, maps, and crime statistics,
which inform their dictionary knowledge on people, and their spatial models on
urban landscapes. These ultimately function as short-cuts on which subjects and
areas to govern. While it may appear reasonable for police to devise criminal pro-
files based on police data, officers speak of “target groups”, underscoring the
undirected and generalised nature of the label. The term also emphasises the shift
from specific, individual offenders (punishment mentality) to risky subpopulations
(risk mentality). According to the officer, “target groups”and those over-repre-
sented in crime statistics must be stopped and searched. This implies that the
deviant is not necessarily identified on the basis of apparent non-conformism. For
the police, crime statistics function as a biopolitical technology to make risky sub-
populations observable and controllable. Then again, the “hit rate”of proactive
stops are relatively low (C
ßankaya 2012).
If we focus on the gendering of public space, women are largely rendered
absent by police officers (see Massey 1994). Police officers construed women as
innocent, gullible, and well-meaning, and in relation to their m
etier, thus irrele-
vant. Victims, surely, but not perpetrators of crime. Officers, however, routinely
connected women with a Roma background to crime. Here we see particular
intersections of gender, race and class at work. Conversely, the widely shared
assumption among officers is that men commit crimes. As much as I would want
to examine these statements in more detail; of relevance is that these axioms did
not lead to officers stopping and searching all categories of men or masculinities,
but in particular those rendered “problematic”,“dangerous”and “risky”. Hyper-
masculinity, as performed by parts of the white working class and/or racialised
youth were deemed worthy of police attention.
For instance, the policing dictum of looking out for “young men in expensive
and showy cars”was mentioned frequently and particularly targeted the working
class, racialised as “ethnic minorities”but also as “white”. At the same time, these
imaginations cannot be reduced to mere class differentiations as they intersect
with race and gender, and largely targeted young racialised men. Paradoxically
for racialised youth, it is their consumerism that renders them visible.
Yesterday we saw this big guy on a chopper bicycle, with large wheels and huge han-
dlebars. For a Moroccan, that’s a weird combination. They normally drive on other
bicycles, cheap ones. Older ones. But this was an expensive bicycle and then with this
kid on it.
These raced, classed and gendered incongruences draw the attention of police on
the beat. For minoritised youth, it is precisely their “successful integration”in
global capitalism that sets them apart from other citizens, while in the case of
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vehicle stops, middle-class members of racialised groups, both male and female,
also face racial profiling. As highways and roads are somewhat decontextualised
spaces, officers cannot as easily rely on geographical cues, as well as other mark-
ers of risk. As such, their decisions have a more binary character—racial markers
become salient to give meaning to normalcy/abnormalcy, risky/risk-free and so
forth. Equally, when these categories of citizens sport flashy cars, motorcycles,
bicycles and clothing, it can generate distrust among some police officers.
My colleague goes, “look, a negro [sic] on a Ducati [motorcycle]. Have you ever seen
that, a negro [sic] on a Ducati?”That is a really expensive bike. I said, let’s go check it
out. So this man says, I have two more in my garage. Then my colleague admits to
him, stupidly, you don’t see that often, right, a negro [sic] on a Ducati? This guy took
it well and said, well, things are never what they seem.
In the eyes of the police officer, these groups are untrustworthy consumers who
may have procured their material goods unlawfully. Living large paradoxically
comes at the cost of becoming a possible target of unjust policing practices. The
exclusion of racialised categories is not only premised on “their failure to achieve
consumer-citizen status”(El-Tayeb 2012); at times, it is their achieving of this sta-
tus that causes distrust.
Toward an Understanding of Geopolicing
In the last paragraph I focused on the everyday typologies of police officers. While
they provide some insight into police stops, they are too rudimentary to account
for ambiguities and geographic contingencies. Police officers stop and search peo-
ple who do not fit their image of streets and neighbourhoods (Bayley and Men-
delsohn 1969), wondering what business they have in places where they do not
match the local demography. The spatial perspective gives rise to a normative
taxonomy about good/bad, just/unusual and risky/non-risky (Rubinstein 1973).
The police officer then searches for deviations from this “picture”(Punch 1979;
Van Maanen 1978), applying this theory of “out of placeness”to concrete set-
tings.
The most recent police stop was of two Polish men. We were riding in a patrol car
and from the richer part, say, Zwanenbloem Avenue [in Amsterdam IJburg], a car was
driving with two Polish men in it. I knew they were Polish because of their license
plate. We once had an attempted burglary with Polish men, so yes, your gut says they
do not belong there, for several reasons. It was just a very old car, almost falling apart.
The guys were a bit unkempt too, they were on that side of the neighbourhood, and
they do not drive there often. So we stopped the car. Turned out to be nothing
wrong. They had been fishing in Purmerend and had visited a friend. There were no
further distinctive features or peculiarities, we just checked them, but everything was
fine. So especially the idea of, yeah, that doesn’t belong here, let’s just check it out.
The above shows that police officers not only rely on concrete intelligence but
also on generalised and sometimes dated information. The officers emphasise that
the incongruence between the person and the location affects their judgment
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“on that side of the neighbourhood”, showing that the men’s ethnic background
and the officers’assessment of their socio-economic status influence their decision
to stop the car. What also mattered was the racialisation of the two Polish men—
ethnicised as other and perceived as “not-quite-white”—demonstrating that theo-
ries of racialisation must take contemporary racial, economic, and political dynam-
ics into account as these men were seen as racially distinct from the
autochthonous, thus white Dutch populace. Some police officers racialised Poles as
recognisable due to their “angular jaws”; others, without much desire for coher-
ence, mentioned their “round puffy faces”.
Certain “unrespectable”groups deemed to make up the white working class
were also racialised and seen as a distinct, naturalised category. They were per-
ceived as individuals lacking intelligence, involved in unruly behaviour and petty
crime. Class-based cues and markers of and on the body set these groups apart
from middle and higher-class white Dutch people. I repeatedly observed officers
referring to the white working class as “single-celled”people (eencelligen) and
“north clones”(noordklonen), referring to their residence in the north of Amster-
dam and imagining them as “cloned inbreeds”. White police officers, some of
whom came from similar neighbourhoods or class backgrounds, continuously
highlighted the poor cognitive abilities of the so-called noordklonen. The words
created distance between themselves and these outgroups.
In the following example, we again see how the urban allochthone stands out
in a specific geography, that of a predominantly white neighbourhood with resi-
dents who earn above average.
Look, in that expensive street. In that really expensive street ... a shabby car was driv-
ing, a Toyota Starlet with a Moroccan in it. That car will be stopped!Why? In that
street there are no Moroccans in Toyota Starlets!They don’t live there at all, it’s such
an expensive neighbourhood. What are you doing over there? You cannot get lost
there either. So if you drive there, you drive there because you’re there on purpose,
because it is not a main road. So this guy pulls over. And then it turns out that he has
a criminal record for drugs. Which made me think he was driving cocaine around. He
is in an expensive neighbourhood where many yuppies live, who go out and every-
thing. So we observe that there are lots of little couriers in our neighbourhood. I did
not find anything on him though.
The presence of “out of place”(Douglas 2001) bodies in white neighbourhoods
constitutes a violation of socio-spatial meanings. Here, “the neighbourhood”can-
not simply be seen as a stable template upon which things happen; it is the pro-
duct of social imagination and a politics of representation, a knowledge that is
never simply objective even if mediated by maps, crime statistics, algorithms and
visualisations that seek to objectify and justify. For instance, the officer could not
have known from the outset that the driver was “Moroccan”. This spatialised
racialisation only makes sense because the driver stood out in a white, affluent
neighbourhood, and because urban allochthones form “target groups”thought
to harbour ill intentions. In other words, the urban allochthone takes shape
against a particular middle-class autochthony, that is to say—the unnamed cate-
gory of whiteness is operative.
10 Antipode
ª2020 The Authors. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.
Police officers depict cities as a mosaic of communities living side by side
(C
ßankaya 2012)—an essentialist vision of society that assumes homogeneous
groups from which a solidified spatial ordering becomes meaningful. However,
this image does not match actual neighbourhood demography in super-diverse
cities, where ethnic concentrations are limited (and identities complex). The
police stop is an intervention in the officers’toolkit to regulate “bad”mobilities,
and give the semblance of control, as they try to impose a spatial order on an
otherwise fluid and messy metropole. Out-of-placeness particularly becomes sali-
ent when marginalised male migrants are spotted in affluent neighbourhoods
populated predominantly by the “autochthonous”demographic. (However, also
working class white men, and homeless people, street addicts, and junkies—both
“white”and otherwise—drew the officers’attention, underlying my argument on
the urban allochthone.) To support the above, I introduce the assumptions of the
police officers quoted above.
We have a bit of public housing on the west side of our district. So there you have
other sorts of social problems, such as domestic violence. The Schinkel district is for
instance comprised of only public housing, so there you have many fights, quarrels
between neighbours and noise complaints, that kind of stuff. The more you go to the
east, or the old south, yeah that’s socioeconomically ... yes, they are rich you know. If
you go to the rich Valerius district, yes, you do not have those kinds of calls or com-
plaints. We actually don’t go there much. Those people are rather all victims of bicycle
theft or motorcycle theft, vehicle theft. Or burglaries. And if you go to the more
expensive neighbourhood, the Oranje Nassau Avenue, there’s a lot of robberies and
carjackings ... It is a white neighbourhood. Let me put it this way. In neighbourhoods
with public housing it is ethnically diverse. But the other neighbourhoods are gener-
ally, well white. There are also many beautiful and large houses.
As the spatial scale of the neighbourhood is too coarse, police officers use subtle
categorisations at the level of streets based on ethnicity, class and residential stig-
mas. One officer told me:
You have an area, the Zwanebloemlaan, and people with money live there. And actu-
ally right opposite of it we have a street with public housing on one side and owner-
occupied houses on the other. You see it actually in all of IJburg that public housing
and owner-occupied homes sit together. So you see throughout IJburg that different
cultures collide ... On one part of the street people have nice, expensive bikes in front
of their houses, and the other side of the road steals them.
Both examples concern neighbourhoods which are the target of municipal poli-
cies of urban restructuring and “liveability”. Distinctions of order/chaos, poor/rich
and us/them crucially inform the proactive stop. Here, ethnicity and lower social
class lump together while wealthier neighbourhoods are seen as “hotspots”with
“hot products”. This suggests that the spatial practices of police officers help to
distinguish propertied middle-class citizens from urban allochthones. The residen-
tial stigmas also create room for metaphors of infection and cleansing (Goffman
1963) as urban allochthones in privileged white neighbourhoods transgress the
symbolic order. These representations and practices also fuel ideas about which
neighbourhoods “make”perpetrators and which ones contain victims, illustrating
Geopolicing Race, Gender, and Class 11
ª2020 The Authors. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.
the connection between raced, classed and gendered urban landscapes, and how
these meanings attach to bodies.
When we have car thefts, or burglaries in the Rivierenbuurt, it comes from the Pijp,
the Diamantbuurt or from West. A lot of rich people live in the Rivierenbuurt, so there
are a lot of expensive cars and stuff here. If I was a Moroccan man from West, or just
any other criminal, because I always seem to mention West [laughs], then I would
come here too.
In police sociology and criminology “out of placeness”is generally treated in
seemingly neutral ways, failing to see geographies as sites of power and privilege.
On closer examination, the dominant theory of out-of-placeness has its limita-
tions. In ethnically heterogeneous neighbourhoods (for instance Diamantbuurt in
East, Geuzenveld in West and the Bijlmer in Southeast), officers invoke demogra-
phy to defend their stopping of minorities—the “natural”residents of these areas.
We were doing a police stop in Amsterdam-West, and then the tenth person said for
the tenth time, that I was stopping him because he was a Moroccan. It is nonsense. It
is just as illegitimate as a negro [sic] saying in the Bijlmer, “it’s because I am a negro
[sic], right?”I mean, 95% of the people living in the Bijlmer are Negroid [sic], so it
makes no sense. These people always make me laugh.
This finding was echoed in Amsterdam’s other ethnically heterogeneous neigh-
bourhoods with generally lower levels of socio-economic status and income. How-
ever, this demographic rationale was rarely used to justify the policing of
“natural”residents in middle and upper-middle class neighbourhoods. There, out-
of-placeness justified stops of urban allochthones. Geopolicing refers to both
increased surveillance of the city’s disadvantaged areas—incidentally with higher
numbers of residents with migrant backgrounds—and to containing the mobility
of urban allochthones, both white and minority, when they are not in their
“proper places”.
R: “You know, it is simple demographics. You cannot escape it. In the Southeast, I
only stop Surinamese people. If I would have worked in Amstelveen, I would stop a
lot of white people. So it’s not just related to ethnicity, but to the people who live
there, and who causes nuisance.”
I: “But is it true that more white people are stopped in Amstelveen? We encountered
different practices there.”
R: “Yes and no. I know from reliable sources that autochthonous kids are stopped
there quite a lot. But it’s more when they drive in big cars, or for possible drunk driv-
ing. But. If a Moroccan drives through Amstelveen, just driving, then hell yeah, he will
be stopped. Because he is not part of the demography. We notice.”
Census data—or demography—answers to some degree questions on the (dis)
proportionality of police stops, however in itself it does not provide a reasonable
justification for police stops (and, again, was not invoked in the case of affluent,
white neighbourhoods). At work is rather the identification of “problem neigh-
bourhoods”, with “high numbers of crime and nuisance”(aided by crime
12 Antipode
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statistics), and “ethnic concentrations”(yet the “ethnic concentration”of white,
autochthonous populations are not problematised), where “perpetrators”and
“possible deviants”can be localised. These larger social processes shape how
police officers identify spaces and subjects of intervention, and legitimise police
stops. As Appadurai (1996) argues, locality comes into being in and through dis-
cursive constructions about particular spaces. Without such maps on the city and
its neighbourhoods—replete with ideas about where to be and whom to contain
—policing practices would be incoherent. Increased statistical means, predictive
profiling and algorithms—all aiming to predict crime through “objective”maps
with proxies for race, class, gender, residential status and so forth—could solidify
these governance processes of problematisation, identification and intervention.
Normatively, these cartographies can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, exclusion
and, in general, unjust policing, while appearing as rational, technocratic and
technological (thus seemingly neutral) programs.
Aesthetic representations of public space (Mitchell 2002) are of importance too,
including the afore-mentioned symbols of decay, vandalism, danger and crime
associated with marginalised neighbourhoods. They inform practices of geopolic-
ing certain milieus, and people in the city.
This neighbourhood can be divided into two parts: the Indische Buurt and KNSM
Island. The former has a different public. A lot of old, renovated houses, early 20
th
century. Small, cheap houses with a lot of Moroccan and Turkish families. The Indis-
che Buurt is a problem neighbourhood, with loitering youth and robbers. And yeah,
KNSM Island is very diverse. It has some Surinamese people, but most are Dutch, how
do you say that, originally Dutch families. The houses are expensive and just recently
built. KNSM is newer, more modern. The streets are well-organised, uncluttered. It is
the atmosphere of the neighbourhood, you see. In the Indische Buurt there are cof-
feeshops [selling cannabis], KNSM doesn’t have them.
Spatial imaginations of the “degeneration”(verloedering) of certain urban areas
are central to geopolicing. Officers mentioned the “atmospheric report”(sfeerver-
baal) which presents a certain image of a neighbourhood in terms of nuisance,
vandalism and littering on the streets. It can, in certain circumstances, justify a
police stop. For instance, the presence of loitering youth who are minding their
own business without making undue noise can trigger both citizens and police
officers (see also Martineau 2006). By cracking down on both audial and visual
disorder, the police are restoring the moral and aesthetic order of neighbour-
hoods:
If I am in a decent and clean neighbourhood, and some kid is hanging in front of his
door, than I will probably not act on it. But if I am in a problem neighbourhood, I
might approach him. In an atmospheric report we paint the image of a neighbour-
hood.
For social scientists, security professionals and public administrators, these stops
illustrate policies to combat street nuisance (overlast) whereby young men are
processed into “data points”and categories like “hindering”,“unruly”or “crimi-
nal”to improve neighbourhood “liveability”(leefbaarheid) (De Koning 2017).
Geopolicing Race, Gender, and Class 13
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“Problem neighbourhoods”(probleemwijken) are seen as warranting state inter-
vention. Urban allochthones deemed to be “hijacking”or disrupting the city’s
spaces by hanging around are to be taken “out of anonymity”. In discourses of
media, politics and government these public squares are perceived as the domain
of young, hypermasculine men with mostly migrant and Muslim backgrounds
(see also El-Tayeb 2012). Geopolicing urban allochthones implies the contain-
ment, isolation and displacement of these hypermasculinities, which always cut
across other identifiers, such as race and class, to protect women in the public
sphere from cat-calling and other forms of harassment.
Finally, as proactive policing does not target specific individuals but risky
groups, stops rarely lead to arrests. This cannot surprise; we are, after all, in the
pre-crime phase. Proactive policing therefore goes hand in hand with the domi-
nant trend of intelligence-led policing. Within this framework, the police manage-
ment expects street-level officers to make “mutations”—data registrations of
police stops that might (again based on probability) lead to criminal cases.
Ifind a police stop successful if I know the identity of a person. So name, address, his
profession and what he is doing here. So it’s effective if I have seen an identity card,
to enter that in the system. You see, it’s a bit of data that might be useful in the
future. So it’s about collecting intelligence.
It’s better to put too much information in the system, than too little. These loitering
youth, sometimes we don’t know them. When we have youth hanging out, I stop
them and ask for ID. Then I put that in the system under “control”,“control youth”,
and put all their names and the license plates of their scooters in there. It’s just to
monitor those groups, to make relationships visible. Sure, sometimes it’s useless, but I
would rather do too much than too little.
A substantial minority of police officers resist these developments and use their
street-level discretion to go against the dictums and expectations of policy.
Favouring constitutional norms of justice and non-discrimination, they privilege
the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of racialised communities. Others argue
that reasonable suspicion must exist or that concrete deviant or suspicious beha-
viour be observed. Otherwise, it is unacceptable to randomly approach youths
who are just hanging out on the street.
Look, I talk to Moroccan boys. They say, how is it possible you come to us, shake our
hands, talk to us, and then register our data in police computers? Why do you expect
us to respect you in turn? They are spot on. They are. I said, you are right, that implies
distrust. So I disagree with my bosses. I know they want me to put all this data and
information in police systems, but I refuse to do so. That’s my loyalty to myself, citi-
zens and these boys. If you do not harm anyone, I will not harm you. So I won’t
always make an entry in our system. Sometimes it’s better to win a hundred souls
than make two hundred entries in the system.
These practices are paradoxical in their outcomes: while the collection of data is
suspended, the goal nevertheless remains the containment of these young men
through other means. These surely more humane interactions between officers
and young men (walking up to them, shaking hands) are still no coincidences.
14 Antipode
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Power differentials between wielders of state power and citizens are present, and
at work.
Differences in policing styles—between for example “the crime fighter”,“the
watchman”[sic] and “the legalistic officer”(see Wilson 1968)—clearly matter. But
differences and ambiguities in the cognitive maps, practices and styles of police
officers notwithstanding, they share a dominant cultural knowledge to make
sense of the city and its citizens. While I cannot fully develop the argument here,
the following is salient: the raced, classed and gendered mental maps of police
officers are neither the cognitive aberrations of individuals nor unique to white
police officers. Such psychologising would elide the organisational, economic and
societal processes and the many intersecting forms of power that inform street-
level practices of geopolicing. After all, none of this takes place in a vacuum.
Imposing institutional order on society implies, for starters, that the police organi-
sation works to achieve coherence among officers, indeed sometimes “greedily”
(Coser 1974), without suggesting that interpretations of organisational members
can be fully encapsulated by the institution.
Conclusion
Rather than looking for criminal behaviour, police officers look if members of mar-
ginalised and undesirable groups are in, or out, of their “proper places”. The
intervention at their disposal—the proactive police stop—should be understood
as a technique of geopolicing society’s subpopulations, a spatial governmentality
of who belongs where that discourages the presence of urban allochthones in the
city’s more privileged neighbourhoods. Geopolicing presupposes the figure of the
urban allochthone—identified by class, race, gender, age, and residential status—
within a spatial governmentality; and describes their isolation, containment, and
removal. It is, to be clear, a form of population control, aimed at governing the
mobility of urban allochthones. Police officers’defensive work informs a “harden-
ing of space, a reinforcement of boundaries and distinctions, and the fortification
of property, place or nation”(Mitchell 2002:381).
As mentioned, rather than taking the body as the foundation of analysis, I pri-
oritised the spatial practices in which raced, classed and gendered bodies are
imbued. Geographical cues and meanings stick to “bodies”of urban
allochthones, and inform moral judgments on where they do, and do not belong.
To be precise: geography matters to the body. But instead of taking geographic
locations, demography, crime statistics, predictive maps and bodies as objective
and given truths, I focused on the work of police officers, not in terms of an
instrumental-rational “meeting of policy targets”or even real or imagined
attempts to reduce crime, but the work required to make racialised, gendered and
classed geographical differentiations. Space, race, gender and class mutually co-
construct each other. Moreover, police officers can think, learn, speak and act as
if these categories are real (which they are in their consequences) because of the
discourses and practices that materialise them, informing future cognitive maps.
Among so many other things, this leads to a feedback loop.
Geopolicing Race, Gender, and Class 15
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City landscapes and geographies are ever-changing stages for the protagonists
that pass through it. For police officers they serve as canvasses—fluctuating and
dynamic interpretive frames—to positively and negatively code subjects. If under-
stood on a continuum: urban allochthones become more risky in privileged areas
of the city, where they “do not belong”(detailing displacement), and less threat-
ening yet still “target groups”in the areas where they presumably belong (point-
ing to containment). In marginalised neighbourhoods, spatial cues of decay and
vandalism, which are proxies for “degeneration”and “unliveability”, co-construct
the urban allochthone in terms of race, gender and class. The aforementioned
argues against decontextualised understandings of race, gender and class as a pri-
ori social facts embedded in bodies. More specifically, in the case of street-level
policing, there is no beyond space. Specific race, gender and class differentiations
are enabled, and made sensible through space, and relationally produce a contin-
uum of “risky”and “dangerous”bodies. I am, however, not negating stabilised
social processes, as the police stop still implies an interpellation: stopping, halting
and anchoring meanings, bodies, spaces, thus social processes. The urban
allochthone, who comes in many different shapes, contrasts with a specificmid-
dle-class whiteness, which remains unquestioned.
To build on this, my second-order, etic invocation of the malleable and contin-
gent urban allochthone stands in clear opposition to policy and academic concep-
tualisations that follow a fixed culturalist, nativist and racialised logic of belonging to
the soil. In these usages, an allochthone is solely construed as the descendant of
postcolonial and labour migrants. While the city is of course connected to ideas of
the nation and belonging, the figuration of the urban allochthone travels,
metaphorically this time, reconfiguring and sticking to different dangerous and
undesirable people: racialised minorities, (white) working class people, migrants,
refugees, the homeless, beggars and the urban poor at large; they are not from this
urban soil. I do not mean to reify here: meanings and representations of the urban
allochthone are forged, moulded and stuck on bodies by police officers in relation
to specific geographies, and a variety of risk indicators.
Geopolicing is more than what police officers do: it refers to administrative con-
trol of urban landscapes in the broadest sense, and is therefore connected to lar-
ger policy frameworks that co-construct raced, classed and gendered landscapes.
Stop and search, a concrete technique of geopolicing, therefore works together
with municipal policies of urban restructuring or “liveability”programs: the police
protect the economic order that emerges from the efforts of public administrators
and the city council to make so-called “neighbourhoods in crisis”with the wrong
kind of “ethnic concentrations”more appealing to capital investment. As shown
in this paper, this is particularly salient in neighbourhoods with a mix of social
housing and owner-occupied homes where the police guard a public sphere that
caters to middle and upper-middle class fears of urban allochthones. This
geopolicing of public space aligns with the economic status quo as officers—
regardless of their “real”intentions or consciousness—minimise risks by protecting
the interests and investments of “respectable”home owners over the freedom of
movement of the less affluent and marginalised. Policing practices shape domi-
nant ideologies, governance and political economy, yet as the police organisation
16 Antipode
ª2020 The Authors. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.
largely aligns with the status quo, it follows rather than resists state and manage-
ment priorities. Geopolicing takes place at a specific juncture of broader social,
political and economic forces, and urban policies such as gentrification, “problem
neighbourhoods”, and “liveability”programs.
One consequence of geopolicing is that public space becomes increasingly
inaccessible to identifiable groups of people. The development towards a privi-
leged centre in Amsterdam, following London and Paris, with unaffordable hous-
ing for low and middle income households, will likely intensify the spatial
exclusion of marginalised risky citizens. In certain areas of the city, the visual pres-
ence of urban allochthones is coded as transgressive, out of the ordinary, unclean.
Geopolicing thus includes the aesthetic re-ordering and cleansing of urban “mat-
ter out of place”. Paradoxically, this undermines the larger municipal policy com-
mitment towards an undivided city. All of this can fuel spatial fragmentation,
limiting the mobility, autonomy and agency of urban allochthones, and creating
social distance between different categories of citizens in the city.
While I contend that there is a hegemonic spatial order, this does not mean that it
goes uncontested—struggle is part and parcel of social processes. On a micro-socio-
logical level, police officers use their discretion and room for manoeuvring to go
against these larger policy orientations, as they have to negotiate the pressures of
everyday policing. Equally, the urban poor continuously resist the identities that are
projected onto their bodies: both identities and spaces are unstable, multiple and in
flux, let alone their dynamic interconnections. This contestation deserves more
attention in scholarly work, as do efforts to tease out the precise relationships
between police stops, and forms of self-policing. All things considered, police offi-
cers themselves argue that the proactive stop is not necessarily meant to prevent
crime; sometimes they only want urban allochthones to know that they are being
watched, that the police are present. On other occasions, young people are sum-
moned to leave specific areas of the city—its squares and affluent neighbourhoods
—as they “have no business being here”. Self-governance here implies urban
allochthones internalising these moralised geographies, conceding to state-imposed
definitions of alterity, of not belonging, of not being from a particular urban soil.
These forms of intra-border policing, of police officers taking on the role of border
guards, protects privileged and wealthy spaces, racialised as white—a spatial segre-
gation policy based on an economic logic of security.
Acknowledgements
I particularly want to thank Yannick Coenders and Markus Balkenhol for our animated con-
versations on race and geography, and the lessons they taught me. Many thanks also to
Alvaro Oleart, Merijn Hoijtink and Pooyan Tamimi Arab for their suggestions. I am indebted
to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, who really shaped this paper.
Finally, special thanks to Takeo David Hymans for editing the article.
Notes
1
As of 1 January 2013, the division of ethnic categories in Amsterdam was 49.4% auto-
chthone Dutch, 15.7% western allochthones, 10.6% other non-western allochthones, 9%
Geopolicing Race, Gender, and Class 17
ª2020 The Authors. Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.
Moroccans, 8.5% Surinamese, 5.3% Turks, and 1.5% Antilleans (Gemeente Amsterdam
2013:14).
2
The “neighbourhood combinations”include: Overtoomse Veld, Osdorp-Midden,
Geuzenveld, Indische Buurt West, Indische Buurt Oost, Slotermeer-Noordoost, Nieuwen-
dam-Noord, Transvaalbuurt, Holendrecht, Slotermeer-Zuidwest, Landlust, IJplein/Vogelbu-
urt, Gein, Van Galenbuurt, Dapperbuurt and Hoofdweg.
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