Perception of Race Discrimination by the Police in Europe

Abstract

Procedural justice is an important principle in democratic societies, which fails when police discriminate minorities through for example racial profiling and during crime report procedures. This not only violates individuals' rights, it also increases corruption, make police work problematic and decrease trust in the justice system. The aim of the chapter is to investigate perception of police discrimination against minorities, with focus on whether anti-immigrant attitudes have an independent impact on the perception of police discrimination. We use European Social Survey, collected in 2010, including 24 countries and around 45,000 respondents. The results show that anti-immigrant attitudes imply that respondents don't believe the police to discriminate independent on individual factors such as education, gender, minority and country factors such as corruption, inequality and the proportion of non-European inhabitants in the country.