© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF THE POLICING OF INTERNAL BORDERS IN THE NETHERLANDS Synergies Between Criminology and Anthropology Paul Mutsaers* Tense contact between the police and migrants in Western societies remains to be an important topic in police scholarship. In sociological studies of the police, this matter is ascribed to the dis- cretionary authority of individual of icers that is sanctioned by their departments—not to of icial policy or direct ethnic or racial orientations. This article (1) discusses the ‘policing of migration’ literature that claims the exact opposite; (2) applies this literature to the Dutch context in order to show that migrants are increasingly and deliberately targeted for control by numerous public, semi-public and private agencies; (3) empirically explores the ramiications of such ‘internal bor- der control’ and (4) argues in favour of a synergy between criminological and anthropological work on this topic. Keywords: internal borders, thickening borderlands, policing of migration, ethno- racial proiling Municipal oficial 1: Who can forward this to the Aliens Police? Police oficer 1: That’s just a matter of calling them. You can do it, I can do it…. Police. Check. When did it [his residence permit] expire? June 16? I can ask it during the break, then we have it uh…. Youth worker: [Sarcastically] Oh, we have a party today, it’s his birthday! Police oficer 1: Today is his birthday? Youth worker: Yes, he is turning 18! Police oficer 2: So, he can just scram. He wanted to go to Bosnia anyway, he said. We can speed things up for him. Coordinator municipality: It is no longer in a state of war. Police oficer 2: Nope, nothing wrong there. Municipal oficial 2: Our approach is working. Police oficer 1: We have a new item on the agenda: Making a birthday calendar. We can visit them at home. Happy birthday! Coordinator municipality: Congratulations with your eighteenth. Introduction The importance in police scholarship of strained relations between the police and migrants in Western societies has remained undiminished over the years. There is a robust literature—in criminology (Brunson and Miller 2006; Hallsworth 2006; Aas *Paul Mutsaers, Faculty of Humanities, Tilburg University, Warandelaan 2, 5037 AB Tilburg, The Netherlands; p.mutsaers@ uvt.nl; Police Academy of the Netherlands, School for Police Leadership, Arnhemseweg 348, 7334 AC Apeldoorn, The Netherlands. doi:10.1093/bjc/azu033 BRIT. J. CRIMINOL. (2014) 54, 831–848 Advance Access publication 20 May 2014 831 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/article-abstract/54/5/831/358479 by Universiteit van Tilburg / Tilburg University user on 07 June 2018