Thursday, June 27, 2013
A0.08 (Oudemanhuispoort)
Terms such as ‘crimmigration’ (Stumpf 2006, Van der Leun 2010) and ‘Criminal Law of the Enemy’ (Guia et al., 2012) point to social control increasingly being oriented towards individuals with a migrant background, seen as ‘dangerous others’. Most of the work in his field pays attention to policies at the national and regional/local level, rather than to cities as specific sites of control. In urban areas where both the number of visible others and registered crime data are high, social control has increasingly become oriented towards the criminalized other. At the same time, cities and urban neighborhoods are also the places where social control has to be put into practice and where concrete policy dilemmas come to the fore. These dilemmas sometimes lead to sanctuary rather than repressive answers. For instance: frontline police officers are on the one hand supposed to fight illegal residence and anti-social behavior of (migrant) youngsters in the street, whereas on the other hand they have to secure good community relations. This sometimes also supports sanctuary solutions or ‘safe havens’. In this respect it is telling that some Dutch municipalities have openly opposed recent ( and still pending) proposals for the de jure criminalization of illegal residence. This article will pay attention to tensions between different policy levels, as well as perceptions and narratives from different perspectives, including those of migrants and the police.
