Racist Victimization, Legal Estrangement and Resentful Reliance on the Police in Sweden
| Author | Kıvanç Atak |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211023974 |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Racist Victimization,
Legal Estrangement and
Resentful Reliance on the
Police in Sweden
Kıvanc¸ Atak
Stockholm University, Sweden
Abstract
Scholarly literature offers much insight into aggressive policing of racial minorities.
However, research is not equally extensive regarding the experiences of racial minorities
with law enforcement when police response might be decisive for their sense of rec-
ognition and protection as a community. Bridging debates from critical race studies, hate
crimes and legal cynicism, this paper addresses how policing of racist victimization is
experienced by members of racially targeted communities in Sweden. Drawing on
interviews with people having personal and/or vicarious experiences with racist victi-
mization, I analyze resentful reliance on the police through the concept of legal
estrangement. While most respondents describe police treatment in somewhat positive
terms, there is a shared resentment at the police due to the lived experience that racism
often remains undetected. Previous interactions with law enforcement also pave the way
for accumulated skepticism toward the utility of the policing of racial hatred. Disen-
chantment with law enforcement notwithstanding, reliance on the police manifests a will
not just to be recognized as a victim, but also to make the pervasiveness of racism more
visible.
Keywords
Hate crime, legal estrangement, policing, racism, Sweden
Corresponding author:
Kıvanc¸ Atak, Department of Criminology, Stockholm University, SE 10691, Stockholm, Sweden.
Email: kivanc.atak@gmail.com
Social & Legal Studies
ªThe Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/09646639211023974
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
2022, Vol. 31(2) 238–260
Introduction
Recourse to law enforcement is a thorny question for the racially targeted members of
minority populations and communities of color. Reporting racist victimization to the
police, for one thing, can be regarded as necessary and instrumental in redressing the
harms inflicted. Given the history of the strained relationship between the agents of law
enforcement and racial minorities, however, contacting the police might turn out to be a
perturbing experience inimical to, rather than reassuring, one’s sense of recognition and
belonging. Racist offending may thus leave many victims, primary and vicarious, in
quandary as to the involving of the police. Hence, examining in what ways minorities
experience the policing of racial hatred can help us explore the different layers of, and
develop a conceptual framework to understand, this question.
The current study introduces the notion of resentful reliance on the police to com-
prehend the perplexities of minority resort to law enforcement in situations of racist
victimization. I address this question empirically through a qualitative inquiry based on
semi-structured interviews with 19 people, who have personal and/or vicarious experi-
ences with racist offending and its policing in Sweden. By resentful reliance, I refer to a
somewhat persistent reliance on the police despite frustrations with law enforcement that
are directly or remotely linked to being racially targeted. Resentment at the police grows,
on the one hand, out of a shared experience that racist victimization is seldom recognized
and remains unseen. I argue that racism perceived as unseen or undetected can be related
to what has been contested as the ‘mainstream idealist views’ that reduce racism to its
most flagrant forms and self-claimed bigotry (e.g. Bonilla-Silva, 1996, 2015). On the
other hand, resentment also stems from an accumulated skepticism toward the handling
of racial hatred due to the previous interactions with, or undertakings of, the police that
may give rise to a sense of being unworthy or perceived as a suspect community.
In this light, the present work brings in insights from critical race theory to normative
discussions about inclusion and recognition within hate crime scholarship. In particular,
I juxtapose the proposition that manifestations of racism in a colorblind age
1
cannot be
readily reduced to beliefs in, and ideas about racial hierarchy, with the fact that enforce-
ment of hate crime provisions is largely predicated on demonstrable and measurable
individual hostility or prejudice. I present this as a conundrum for the prospects of social
justice enshrined in normative accounts of hate crime laws, and yet one that may help us
understand, at least partially, why police response to racial hatred is more often than not
experienced as racism being unseen.
The current study also borrows from Monica C. Bell’s (2017) definition of legal
estrangement both to fathom respondents’ reliance on the police, and to point that their
discontent with policing cannot merely be attributed to individual attitudes. The concept
of legal estrangement builds on a critical reinterpretation of legal cynicism, originally
defined as anomie about law and societal norms (Sampson and Bartusch, 1998), whereby
Bell put further emphasis on the structural dynamics regarding the alienation of com-
munities of color from the agents of criminal justice. Considering that racism and racial
exclusion are more than individual, to a large extent collectively lived experiences, and
that skepticism toward the police may not be limited to racist victimization only, resent-
ful reliance can be better understood as structurally embedded and needs to be located in
239
Atak
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