ABSTRACT
How police officers employ categories based on culture, ethnicity and race has become the crucial and most discussed issue of policing in the last decades. Ethnographic police research has pointed out discriminatory practices based on such categorisations (Epp et al. 2014; Fassin 2013) but also questioned the relationship between these categorisations and practices (Waddington 1999b). Currently emerging ethnographic approaches allow researchers to generate new questions: as theories on racial profiling have been developed mainly in the United States, how do we grasp the very specific historical trajectories and policing rationalities concerning culture and ethnicity in such different countries as, for instance, France, Germany or South Africa? How are discriminatory speech and practices linked when it comes to policing? And what categories of difference do we, as police ethnographers, employ to label police officers and citizens? These three questions shape this chapter, showing how ethnographic approaches and heightened reflexivity allow us to complicate the issue of race, culture and ethnicity in contemporary policing.
