ABSTRACT
Discriminatory stop and search practices have been named as a major factor behind the recent outbursts of collective youth violence across several European cities. After the Brixton Riots almost exactly 30 years earlier, the Scarman Report concluded that anger was largely fuelled by the 'heavy-handed use of stop and search impacted disproportionately on black and minority ethnic communities'. Numerous qualitative, interview-based studies have documented perceptions of discriminatory treatment and its relationship with distrust and resentment towards the police among minority youths in Europe. Police-initiated contact is a common experience for many urban, especially male adolescents. In the POLIS survey, police trust was generally higher among adolescents in the two German than in the two French cities. The vast difference in police-adolescents relationships in these two countries correspond with the different levels of trust by adolescents in France and Germany. The implications of our comparative findings offer practitioners and politicians a basis by which to improve police-citizen relations.
