Violence against racialized people at national borders has increased in recent years. This has often been successfully denounced by activists. Less attention has been paid to violence at national borders within countries, for example in public places in city centers during random identity checks. Svenja Keitzel draws attention to these everyday encounters with state power and shows their serious consequences for those affected and for democracy at large.
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Encounters with the police have far-reaching consequences, both on a personal and a social level. Some experience the police as a source of protection and assistance. This can strengthen trust in a functioning, democratically legitimized police force. Others experience the police as criminalizing them or not taking them seriously. This can have a negative impact on social participation and trust in the state. The following quote illustrates my thesis that the moment of encounter with the police has a particular impact on both a personal and a social level. One of my interviewees talks about his thoughts after being repeatedly stopped by the police for an identity check at the main train station of a large German city. He says, “That was the first time I thought, ‘You’re a foreigner.’”
He is already aware that he does not have a German identity card and is formally a ‘foreigner.’ Before these experiences, however, this was not a term with which he identified. It is only through the repeated checks and the observation that he and other non-white people are always being stopped that he realizes that he is being read as a non-German because of his appearance and is therefore being checked. It is only through this selective police practice that the ‘first time’ is inscribed in his self-image that he is, as he says, ‘a foreigner.’ And it is precisely such experiences, namely those of people of color, black people, and people read as migrants with the police, that I examined in my doctoral thesis (Keitzel 2024).
Racial profiling is one of the ‘classic’ cases. This is when police actions such as identity checks are based on discriminatory attributions (ethnicity, phenotypical characteristics, national origin, or religion) rather than on specific crimes or concrete suspicions. In addition, encounters with the police in which the person approaching the police does not receive protection or assistance are central. The location of the encounter is also important for the situation. Let me give you a second example.
Over-policing, under-protection and the (re)production of racism
A 30-year-old man who fled Afghanistan and now lives in a large German city leaves the train station with his friend who fled Iran. There they are stopped by the police for an identity check. My interviewee says that his friend is very afraid of the police because of the violence he experienced in Iran. He says, “I will never forget that day because he was shaking. And I said [to the police], ‘Please, we have to go.’” The policeman replies with a curt “No,” to which my interviewee asks the policeman, “What did we do?” There is silence at first, and the policeman replies: “I told you not to talk.” He asks the policemen to move quickly. However, the policemen do not respond to this request and show no empathy.
This encounter demonstrates two things. First, ignoring the man’s need for help, who is obviously in a bad emotional state, is a tool for creating racialized difference. The ignorance towards the presumably traumatized man shows that the police see him at this moment primarily as a person to be policed and that they strive to carry out the check accordingly. The policemen show no empathy or help. I, like others elsewhere (Saarikkomäki et al. 2020, Thompson 2021), refer to this police inactivity, i.e. ignoring the need for help, as underprotection. Thus, racialized difference can be produced not only by police activity and overpolicing (Saarikkomäki et al. 2020), such as racial profiling, but also by inactivity. Although we do not know the motivation for ignoring the man’s need for help at this point, it can be said that it was ignored. There was no empathic response to the man, nor was the need for control challenged.
Obviously, the two men had not committed any criminal or administrative offense at the time, yet they were stopped. This leads to the second point: the site of the encounter. The site of the control becomes a stage on which difference is (re)produced through selective police practices. It is a public, highly frequented and policed place where the police are allowed to carry out checks without suspicion according to the state police law. In principle, the law does not provide for checks without concrete suspicion or the existence of a crime. This is because an identity check is an infringement of fundamental rights. However, the police are allowed to take preventive measures in so-called ‘dangerous places,’ i.e. in advance of a possible crime. These so-called suspicionless controls open the door to selective and therefore discriminatory police action (Keitzel 2020). If a person’s actual behavior (committing a crime) is not the deciding factor, then it is obvious that action is being taken on the basis of appearance or attributions based on appearance.
In this case, two men of color are searched in front of passersby, which criminalizes and stigmatizes them. Although they have not committed a crime, the stop gives the impression that they are criminals. This negative experience not only burdens them, but also conveys to passersby that they are protected by the police from the supposedly ‘dangerous others.’
The moment of the encounter and the social conditions: Geographies of encounter
I have developed the concept of geographies of encounter to analyze the reciprocal tension between the particular and structural levels of the moment of encounter. The geographies of encounter capture the social situatedness, the everydayness, and the meaning of space as mediated in the moment of encounter. I conceptualize geographies of encounter following Sara Ahmed’s “Strange Encounters” (2000). In doing so, I enrich Ahmed’s argument that difference is (re)produced, negotiated, and challenged in the moment of encounter with a theory of space. Geographies, i.e. the social production of places, spaces and borders, interact with the production of difference along bodies.
In the moment of encounter with the police, social phenomena become concrete and tangible. They are negotiated and in turn affect social relations. At the same time, the encounter always takes place in interaction and connection with processes that go beyond the moment of the encounter, such as national and global processes. The particular moment of the encounter and the social structures are in a reciprocal relationship. Since the place of the encounter (also) structures it, the following applies: it does not matter where the encounters take place and it does not matter which bodies meet. Place, encounter, and body are in a co-constitutive relationship. This means that in the moment of encounter, which is always spatially mediated and situated, social relations of inequality are (re)produced or questioned.
In this way, a concrete encounter can be used as a starting point to examine racist policing and social relations. I therefore advocate thinking about the concrete and the structural together. Even if it is a concrete case, this does not mean that it is an individual case. Rather, the case is embedded in institutional and structural conditions that make it possible. In such encounters with the police, racism operates not only on the level between two people, but is also (re)produced on a societal level. By virtue of their role in enforcing the state’s monopoly on the use of force, the police have a particular power to produce ‘racialized others’ and thus to advance social lines of difference and division. Central to this approach is that not only excessively violent encounters with the police can be taken into account, but also supposedly low-threshold encounters. As bad as excesses of violence and even killings undoubtedly are, normalized everyday racism should not be overlooked.
Understanding the complexity of racist policing
This brings me back to overpolicing and underpolicing. It is crucial to look at both police activity and inactivity in order to better understand racist practices in their complexity and structural integration into power relations. Racism manifests itself not only through excessive police activity, such as racial profiling, but also through police inactivity, when people are denied protection and assistance. This broadens our view of racist practices that are supposedly less obvious or spectacular. It also allows for a deeper understanding of how different forms of discrimination interact intersectionally.
In my research, I deliberately focused on the knowledge of people who have experienced racism. There were two main reasons for this focus. First, lived experiences are not exclusively individual, but structurally determined. This means that when non-white people experience racist treatment by the police in everyday life, this reflects a network of experiences that is permeated by social power relations. This experiential knowledge forms an essential basis for a better understanding of social orders of difference, including racism.
Second, the knowledge of those affected by racism represents a counter-narrative to the hegemonic narrative of the police. The experiences of people affected by racism with the police continue to be underrepresented in both social and academic discourse, although a change can be seen at the latest with the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020. This shift in perspective, away from the police and other security-related actors who are often the focus of such studies, can help reduce the unequal power of interpretation between police and citizens, especially marginalized voices. This can lead to a questioning of perceived normalities. From a socio-political perspective, this is important because the police are an enormously powerful institution that too often goes unquestioned or receives too little critical attention. This is essential for a democratic society.