ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the first police-led diversion project in Denmark, which aimed to direct young people caught by the police in possession of illicit drugs towards treatment services. The project was initiated by a police precinct because of dissatisfaction with traditional law enforcement methods, which were not perceived to achieve the intended goal of dissuading young people from using drugs. Based on interviews with 20 police officers, we illustrate how referral to treatment and social services was not conceptualised as an alternative to criminal sanctions, but rather as ‘another tool in the toolbox’. Rather than representing a complete reorientation away from the criminal justice system, we show how the diversion programme is indicative of a new dual police approach to youth drug use, entailing a combination of traditional punitive deterrence as well as diversion strategies. Drawing on the concept of ‘treatmentality’ (Jöhncke 2009), we discuss how progressive forms of drug control might still maintain a range of problematic assumptions about drug use and drug treatment as the obvious answer to this (Walmsley 2019).
