‘Handled with care’: Diffuse policing and the production of inequality in Amsterdam

Abstract

The intersection of race and the criminal justice system has been a longstanding topic of activism, public debate and research in the US context. In recent years, European countries have also seen a growing social and academic debate about the way racialized minorities are policed. Based on ethnographic research in Amsterdam, this article argues that in order to understand such racialized policing, we have to go beyond a narrow focus on the police itself, and instead examine the broader institutional landscape tasked with security. This institutional landscape is made up of penal and welfare actors who together enact what I call diffuse policing. Such diffuse policing envelops targeted persons and spaces in a dense web of surveillance, and disciplinary and reform interventions that are hard to escape or challenge. This article explores the cumulative effects of this dense security landscape, and argues that it produces significant inequalities among youths in Amsterdam.