ABSTRACT

Adolescents' attitudes to and relations with police can and have been analysed on many different levels. This chapter answers the two overarching questions: what are the conditions under which adolescent trust in the police emerges in France and Germany; and to what extent do the factors which foster or diminish trust differ between these countries? It attempts to implement a more complex approach of combining the micro-level of adolescents' actual experiences of policing with the meso-level of neighbourhood conditions and the macro-level of cross-national differences. Issues of social and national identity in France and Germany are further complicated by religion, especially for the largest minority group of Muslim faith, specifically Maghrebian in France and Turkish in Germany. Adolescents' daily lives in socially and ethnically segregated cities are shaped by their different neighbourhood contexts. National differences in trust in the police can also be associated with differences in the performance of their task in different policing strategies.