How police agencies in Western societies deal with migrants, in particular the quality of police encounters with and the legal entanglements of migrants, is a rich discussion topic for criminologists and sociologists; however, only recently has anthropological work on policing and security emerged. This book strives to continue this development by offering an anthropological perspective on police discrimination and migrant-hostile policing, whilst also drawing on sociological and criminological perspectives in order to unpick the worst and expand on the best that all three disciplines have to offer. As a starting point, the author addresses classical sociological studies of the police, where the reduction of migrant-hostility in policing to problems related to the thinking and behaviour of individual officers is disputed as too narrow and the focus on the particularities of the police organization as unmanageable. This is contrasted with recent work in the field of criminology, where academic discourses have contended that tense relations between the police and migrants cannot so easily be reduced to misrepresentations of migrants by individual officers. Police operations, and their wide range of agency partners, are described as creating a 'thickening' control apparatus that keeps migrants in check; a discussion point which is then developed and compared with the anthropological literature on the 'thickening of borderlands' in the US (Rosas), leading to a call for a synergy between the two disciplines. The final part of the book presents the patterned and systemic nature of migrant-hostility perpetrated by the police, which is then contrasted with anthropological analysis of such instances, utilising methods and analytics (e.g. from linguistic anthropology) to show the contradictions that the police operate under, from their own backgrounds as well as those imposed by policy and practice. The author concludes that the hearts and minds of officers guilty of discrimination are targeted by means of a plethora of psychological instruments (awareness training, coaching, conflict mediation, psychological surveys and tests, confessions, etc.) while they are simultaneously instructed in target-group policing, ethnic profiling, and the policing of 'illegals', culminating in the current status quo where organised migrant-hostility in policing can persist while individuals take the blame for it.
