Policing and equal treatment of ethnic-minority youths

While ‘to protect and to serve’ is the commonly known motto describing the general work of the police not all citizens feel protected and served by the police. This is in particular so for citizens of minority background. There is an extensive mainly Anglo-Saxon research literature that states that extensive discrimination against citizens from ethnic and racial minorities exists and that it is pervasive and structural. This has repeatedly led to accusations of police discrimination, ethnic profiling and even institutional racism. This paper comparatively  investigates the policing of ethnic minority and majority youth  and experiences of those youth affected by policing in the Netherlands. (Perceived) overrepresentation of ethnic minority youth in crime and disorder has led to public calls for tougher police intervention. In the Netherlands the police has responded by introducing proactive policing. Proactive policing aims at suppressing delinquency at an early stage to prevent youth from slipping off into delinquent behavior and crime. This implies that police officers may stop juveniles in the street, without the requirement of reasonable suspicion. As proactive policing gives police officers wide discretionary  powers there is an increased risk, that police officers use their discretion to discriminate on inappropriate grounds such as race. This paper focuses on the question to what extent this proactive policing results in unequal treatment of ethnic minority youth. Whereas the current Dutch political context provided ground to expect a serious level of unequal treatment, the results of a survey turned out better than expected. Proactive policing is associated with serious outcome inequality for ethnic minority youths, but this inequality seems largely an indirect result of justifiable distinctions made during policing.