Abstract
This article offers a theoretical and ethnographic account of what I term “epidemic policing.” The article introduces the notion of epidemic policing to show how Danish measures for countering violent extremism are based on an epidemiological approach resembling the World Health Organization public health rationale, and how the field of countering violent extremism policing is itself expanding in epidemic ways. With an empirical starting point in ethnographic fieldwork among the police in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, the article ponders the intersection between crime prevention and countering violent extremism in urban policing. The article shows that while traditional Danish crime prevention has been marked by conventional processes of securitization and topographical forms of policing, a particular form of topological policing is implied in the security logics of countering violent extremism. This new form of policing entails a reconfiguration of the epidemiological approach, including a diffusion of encoded risk categories, an expansion of institutional security infrastructures, and a de-territorialization of the space that is being policed. The article argues that this reconfiguration of Danish urban policing is a highly spatialized process, which has resulted in the co-production of intensified territorial control and an inert potentiality of policing everywhere in the city.
Keywords
Introduction
In 2016, the principal of one of the public schools in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, reported two young pupils from the seventh grade to the local police. The report went like this: The two boys, age 13 and 14, have changed their behavior over the course of a few months. They seem obsessed with Islam, they dress differently and they claim the need to pray five times a day. Recently, [the school principal] encountered one of the boys in an enclosed area in front of one of the school toilets, where the boy was hiding behind some kind of partition. He had covered the floor with a prayer rug and was saying his prayers in secrecy. [The school principal] attempted to intervene, but the boy did not pay attention. He seemed out of reach and absorbed with his activity.
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This article explores the changing mise-en-scene of urban policing during the 2010s in Denmark by focusing on the ways in which policing practices have changed over time and at the intersection between traditional crime prevention and countering violent extremism (CVE). Taking an empirical starting point in the case on the schoolchildren praying, the article raises a number of important questions as to how Danish urban policing has been affected by the concept of radicalization and the new security logics of CVE. The “Danish Model” for CVE is based on a multi-agency approach, which extends policing practices into various sectors of the welfare system, thereby blurring boundaries between security and other public services. This “welfarization” of security has led to a partial dissolution of what constitutes a particular policing task, which is reinforced further by the way in which radicalization is depicted. The Danish Model uses the World Health Organization’s (WHO) model for how epidemics spread to explain the risk of radicalization. While the Danish authorities do not see the relationship between radicalization and a virus as one-to-one, they do see radicalization as something that spreads, and while some people are more at risk than others, everyone can be “infected” (Albrecht et al., 2017).
In order to examine the implications of this particular understanding of radicalization, I have coined the term “epidemic policing.” What I call epidemic policing points to the way in which Danish CVE measures are based on the epidemiological approach resembling the WHO public health rationale, and how the CVE industry has itself become epidemic. This is evident in terms of both the scope and the kind of security logics that CVE policing represents. While traditional crime prevention has been marked by conventional forms of securitization and highly territorialized policing, CVE represents a new security tendency, which is de-territorialized and all-pervasive, as well as performed by an increasing number of welfare professionals. By this notion, I point to the particular way in which the security model is spreading, emphasizing that the police’s practices of control and intervention mirror their ideas and undergirding security rationalities on the spreading of radicalization. Based on this account, the article argues that the reconfiguration of Danish urban policing is an inherently spatialized process, which is constituted by the co-production of intensified territorial control and de-territorialized policing. This policing dialectic is highly ambivalent and emerges at the intersection between crime prevention and CVE, where policing practices are simultaneously reinforcing and breaking down existing categorical and territorial boundaries that demarcate urban order/disorder.
I organize my argument in two parts. The first part offers a conceptualization of the notion of de-territorialized policing and a theoretical framework for the study of the expanding field of CVE. In this section, I will also take up central methodological approaches involved in generating ethnographic material on CVE policing. In the second part of the article, I explore the various ways in which the police perceive and act upon notions of risk, susceptibility, and contamination and how they seek to prevent the spreading of radicalization in the city of Aarhus. I will use the case involving the schoolchildren praying to illustrate three important points: the diffusion of categories, the expansion of institutions, and the de-territorialization of nonsecure spaces. I show how these three elements are interconnected and constitutive of the patterns of CVE policing. Finally, I bring the two sections together in the “Conclusion” section in order to define the notion of epidemic policing and its security prospects in Denmark.
Conceptualizing de-territorialized policing
This article argues that the CVE industry has become epidemic and has affected the relation between policing and urban space, which is not merely indicated by the scope of security multiplication (Nordstedt and Hansén, 2010), 2 but more importantly by way of the qualitatively new kind of security logic that has emerged during the 2010s. In order to explore this development, the article draws on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2016 and 2018 with police officers and social workers in the so-called Infohouse in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus. The Infohouse is a cross-sectorial organization responsible for the casework, risk assessment, decision-making, and planning of interventions in individual cases of radicalization. In 2016, I was based in an office next to the police commissioner and followed the police officers in their working hours and fortnightly Infohouse meetings. On top of their work on CVE, these police officers were also responsible for general crime preventive activities, neighborhood patrolling, and a gang exit program, and they were thus constantly moving in-between the domains of CVE and traditional crime prevention. Methodologically, this fieldwork was conducted as what we could term organizational ethnography in line with Rhodes’ (2011) work among government elites. This approach stands out from traditional structured interviews in combining observations of office practices with daily conversations and selected in-depth interviews with employees about their work, including in this case their understanding of radicalization and urban threat. 3 My fieldwork in 2016 formed the basis for a follow-up study in 2018, when I attended Infohouse meetings during a period of five months, partly to trace changes in the casework and to validate my previous findings.
As we shall see, one crucial concern of the police was how to understand the relationship between urban social environments and the spreading of radicalization in Aarhus. However, the point that the CVE industry has become epidemic and has affected the relation between policing and urban space is seriously under-theorized in the existing body of literature on counterterrorism. One dominant argument within social science is that CVE is an aspect of “securitization” (Wæver, 1995), a concept that has now become widely accepted to describe the process whereby an increasing number of issues are constructed by states as security threats against which extraordinary measures must be used. This article seeks to advance this argument by making an important distinction between CVE and crime prevention in the Danish case, approaching them as two domains that are expanding in separate ways, and on the basis of different kinds of security logics. The different mechanisms of these domains produce very different outcomes in terms of urban policing. As I will show, the framework of conventional securitization may provide us with a heuristic for understanding the expanding field of policing in traditional crime prevention, where political concerns about particular sub-populations and urban geographies are enfolded into the security discourse, producing a highly territorialized form of policing. However, when approaching the policing of radicalization, the material in this article urges us to move beyond the logics of securitization in order to rework our conception of how and in what form CVE is expanding.
The case on the schoolchildren praying will demonstrate that as far as the new form of policing involves a process of security expansion, it is not so much a matter of new issues being constructed as security threats or extraordinary measures being implemented. Rather, the new form of security expansion involves a far more pervasive reconfiguration of the relationship between policing and urban space. This reconfiguration includes a diffusion of encoded social categories, an expansion of institutional security infrastructures, and most importantly a de-territorialization of the space that is being policed. In line with the introduction to this special issue (Christensen and Albrecht, 2019), I understand urban policing to be closely related to practices of socio-spatial bordering, and I take these bordering practices to be in a constant process of de-territorialization and re-territorialization; of de-bordering and re-bordering, all in the name of controlling the flow of people, ideas, and resources. To the police in Aarhus, this entails a sensitive process of handling new urban threats, in which highly specialized knowledge about violent extremism and de-radicalization meet with new uncertainties involved in behavior detection and early warning. During my fieldwork, I was particularly interested in these uncertainties, and I thus gained access to study incoming reports of concern that formed the basis for the Infohouse’s risk assessment. These reports entailed personal data, such as age, gender, ethnicity, and place of residency of the reported individual; a description of the concern; as well as who did the reporting. To gain this access, I went through a vetting process (equaling the British HMG baseline personnel security standard) prior to obtaining a security clearance (equaling the level of “confidential” in the US). I had access to files in the police’s registers dating back to 2010, including ongoing cases. The material was selected by the police for the purpose of research and with permission from the police commissioner. 4
From securitization to urban resilience governance
Numerous scholars have looked at the connection between discourses of radicalization and wider political issues, such as the intersection between social, integration, and security policies (Neumann, 2013; Sedgwick, 2010), arguing that Islam and Muslims have been increasingly securitized (Abbas, 2011; Laustsen and Wæver, 2000). This approach conceives of securitization as closely related to the use of extraordinary security measures and a distinctly territorialized style of governance, much in line with Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty, which connects territorial enclosure with exceptional politics and radical exclusion. Within CVE studies, scholars have referred to securitization when the terror threat has resulted in a declared state of emergency and the enforcement of extra-legal, sometimes militarized, urban counterinsurgency measures, like in France (Boutin and Paulussen, 2016; Mucha, 2017). Exceptional politics has also been documented to work in less dramatic ways, as an ordinary technology of government that does not need to be legitimized by a declared state of emergency, for instance when governmental actors take strong measures against specific urban sub-populations in order to maintain social order (Fassin, 2013; Gressgård, 2019: 11). Numerous researchers have stressed the negative effects of securitization, one of which is the construction of suspect communities, and the reinforcement of representational boundaries between “us” and “them” (Abbas and Awan, 2015; Breen-Smyth, 2014; Pantazis and Pemberton, 2009). Following from this perspective, securitization has been understood to produce a particular form of topographical policing politics, which relies on territoriality, mapping, and fixity. Topographical policing refers to a distinctly territorialized ordering of the social fabric, which insists on identifying, marking out, and essentializing a definite landscape and its representational boundaries, subsuming a set of encoded positionalities like race, gender, and social class (Campbell, 2016). As scholars have shown, religion and political ideology have also been constructed as social categories—from communism to Islamism—but these phenomena are difficult to operationalize as risk indicators in the framework of democratic constitutional rights. Topographical security and policing links closely to the actuarial management of risk that has gained resonance within criminal law and its enforcement in recent years (Harcourt, 2007). Actuarial science uses statistical methods on large datasets of criminal offending rates to determine different levels of offending associated with particular social groups in order to predict past, present, or future criminal behavior and administer a criminal justice outcome (Harcourt, 2007: 1). Topographical and actuarial policing thus represents a particular kind of risk management which is based on what has already emerged, providing a set of “cartographic figures that enable us to ‘orient’ ourselves” in the urban landscape (Debrix, 2015: 444). It is in this topographical way that the field of policing has expanded during the last decades of crime prevention in Denmark, with what follows as technologies of zoning, segregating, and secluding urban mobilities.
Recently, we have been invited to rethink the notion of security in the context of urban resilience governance, particularly in the context of Western liberal welfare states. Resilience governance has been defined as an “anticipatory technology of government” (Gressgård, 2019: 12), which seeks to enable society to adapt to risk and prepare for unpredictable, complex future threats through capacity building at the local level. Resilience governance follows the imperative to reduce disaster by integrating preparedness and awareness at local level, e.g. by mobilizing communities and institutional professionals to engage in behavior detection, early warning and prevention. The diffusion of risk categories and the expansion of the institutional security nexus have been pointed out as part and parcel of this new security approach. In her work on the implementation of CVE measures in Malmö, Gressgård (2019) has argued that resilience governance moves beyond existing “us” and “them” distinctions and associated topographies of policing, since the solution to threat is “not to protect society from enemies or ‘others’ cast as incongruent counterpart to ‘us’, but rather to enhance the level of adaptivity to uncertainty” (Gressgård, 2019: 15). Referring to Chandler’s (2014) work on resilience governance, Gressgård argues that the result of this approach is a shift of logics from the liberal understanding of evil (threat, disorder) as “other” to the enfolding of evil into the norm, defining it as an outcome of complex social interconnections. The causes are to be found within society itself, within urban relationalities that bread vulnerability to risk. This approach entails a radical breakdown of encoded categories of the “other,” as well as a shift away from spatial seclusion, containment, and associated topographic policing to a situation where “the life to be cared for is equivalent to the life that must be acted over” (Chandler in Gressgård, 2019: 18).
Bringing into this perspective an account of urban policing in Denmark, this article suggests that the diffusion of encoded categories and the break with topographical urban security also involve a reconfiguration of the relation between policing and urban space. Instead of focusing on topographical policing, we must pay attention to what Debrix has called the “topologies of vulnerability” that form the target–object of resilience governance. While topography refers to space as fixity, placement, and grounding, topology is “a matter of relationality, connectivity, distribution, assemblage, transformation, or supplementation” (Debrix, 2015: 444). Discussing Agamben’s and Butler’s work on the camp, Debrix argues that what manifests itself topographically as the camp (in Agamben’s sense) is often the product of a series of topological relations that are always already in sight and crucial to the actualization of the camp. In a similar way, the urban landscape can be read as a series of topological relations, which are realized or realizable in certain spatial configurations and which are always both capable of becoming and not becoming, while topographical space remains (geopolitically) representational and real (Debrix, 2015: 455). In urban resilience governance, this approach resonates with the police’s conception of society as a “topology of vulnerability” (Debrix, 2015: 446) that can become or not become actualized in territories and political markings (see also Grove, 2017).
Topological policing, then, becomes a matter of identifying and controlling what has not yet emerged in the form of a geopolitical, spatial, and fixed categorical configuration, but what exists as an inherently de-territorialized threat or “evil,” and a threat in its inert potentiality. Conceptually, we may think of this distinction through Gilles Deleuze’s notions of emergence and emerged. In Deleuze, movement, change, or indeterminacy constitute the field of emergence, whereas positionings and determinations, such as gender, race, and sexuality, are what emerge (Cull, 2008). With its roots in territorial control and exceptional politics and its incorporation of actuarial science, topographical policing works on the basis of what has emerged, while topological policing, on the other hand, relates to phenomena at their level of emergence and can itself be approached as emergence. Examining epidemic policing at its level of emergence thus entails investigating how the police envision the phenomenon of radicalization as something that can potentially be actualized everywhere and within everyone, and how their response to this diffused epidemic becomes all-pervasive and de-territorialized.
Politics of territoriality: The prologue to the Aarhus Model
The city of Aarhus has a population of about 250,000 and is situated on the eastern coast of the Danish peninsula, Jutland. The inner-city is encircled by an orbital, which demarcates a boundary between middle-class neighborhoods located in the city center and social housing areas located on the outskirts of town. The housing estates were built in the 1970s and became the center for the accommodation of low-income residents after the oil-crisis in 1973. In the 1980s, when refugees started to come to Denmark on a large scale, they were dispersed across the country and placed in social housing in the big cities (Damm, 2005). The social housing estates soon became arenas of class-based and racial segregation, structured by municipal financial budgets and local housing strategies (Johansen and Jensen, 2017). In Aarhus, the social housing estates neighboring upon the orbital developed from working-class peripheries into what Loic Wacquant (2016) has called dispossessed and stigmatized “anti-ghettos,” driven by “class position, inflected by ethnonational membership and mitigated by state structures and policies” (1080). As in other big European cities, these areas developed into the most significant margins of the state, where law and order was most strongly and visibly being enforced (see also Das and Poole, 2004). The Danish welfare state responded to the rise of these neighborhoods by turning them into laboratories for the development of all kinds of security and integration experiments, urban gentrification, and institutionalization. Law enforcement, public services, and institutions were moved into the areas, creating what Paul Mutsaers (2019) has defined as a “thick” institutional landscape. This response is particularly strong in northern Europe with intensive welfare intervention and state proximity being a predominant governance style (Esping-Andersen, 1990). The process reflects a dominant scholarly argument that the way in which order is enforced indicates the more general nature of the state and its ways of operating (Sharma and Gupta, 2006).
The current expression of the increasing desire to implement and manifest borders in and around immigrant housing estates was illustrated by a national anti-ghetto strategy launched by the Danish government in 2004. This action plan was based on the “mixed class paradigm,” taking social class to be contagious, and paving the way for ethnic dispersal policies whose objective was to dissolve so-called parallel societies (Government of Denmark, 2010). The action plan adopted a range of extraordinary measures, such as evictions, dispersing children across city schools, demolition, and increasing police surveillance. The Danish government has recently revised the action plan, which has led to a substantial tightening of extra-juridical sanctions and state interventions in urban “high-risk areas” (Government of Denmark, 2018).
With the rise of the immigrant neighborhoods in the 1980s, policing became increasingly site-specific: Parts of the police force moved out of the inner-city central police station and into police stations in the neighborhood districts, and police outreach was supplemented by the use of mobile police (vans) placed within the neighborhoods (Balvig and Holmberg, 2004). This local focus was strengthened by an emphasis on multi-agency collaboration, most dominantly represented by the formation of the “SSP-partnership” (schools, social services, and police) in the preventive strategy against youth crime (Pedersen, 2015). The triangular collaboration between schools, social services, and the police expanded over the course of the next decades to include a range of ad hoc collaborations, e.g. with employment centers, street-based workers, and a wider range of agencies from the educational sector. As policing became concentrated on the margin, it was based on local embeddedness, face-to-face mentoring, relational work with local youth, as well as the enrolment of residents in monitoring activities.
The Aarhus Model
The local CVE strategy in Aarhus was designed in 2009–2010 by a group of employees from the police and municipal social services. The work was initiated by the then minister of integration Birthe Rønn Hornbech, who called for immediate action after the Madrid bombings in 2004 and the London bombings in 2005. This call to action was further legitimized by the Danish cartoon controversy between 2005 and 2007, giving way to a new political voice claiming that Denmark was on the fringe of crisis and that the Danish public felt fundamentally threatened by the Muslim population (Hervik, 2017; Rytter and Pedersen, 2014). This was a time of heightened security, when critical events in cities around Europe had local political consequences in Denmark, leading to a hardening of the rhetoric about the immigrant other (Kublitz, 2015). The political call to action was answered by the largest Danish municipalities of Aarhus and Copenhagen. The design of these two cities’ local CVE strategies began as an EU-funded pilot project (Thomsen, 2012), supported by the Ministry of Integration, and aimed at the development of a mentor program for the prevention of radicalization. In Aarhus, the mentor program was designed on the basis of an existing multi-sectorial model for early prevention, which had been applied within the crime preventive SSP-collaboration since the 1980s. In the counter-radicalization strategy, the aim of the mentor program was for the mentor to play a significant role in the specific de-radicalization process by pointing to “the pitfalls, the personal and societal dangers, the illegality as well as the mis-directedness of the particular activism,” as well as to help finding paths of inclusion regarding the activities and tasks in the daily life of the mentee (family, work, education, leisure time). As such, the mentor was expected to “be a well-informed, interested and empathic sparring partner, with whom the mentee can discuss questions and challenges of daily life as well as the ultimate concerns of existential, political and religious questions of life” (Bertelsen, 2015: 243).
New measures were developed with the implementation of the mentor program, including psychological counseling, an exit program, and training courses aimed at raising awareness about radicalization among frontline workers. These efforts were partly backed by the allocation of welfare resources to individuals in need of intervention. Potential “radicals” were offered accommodation, education, employment counseling, family counseling, therapy, and financial support within the framework of the normal system. As such, CVE measures were based on education and reformation rather than penalization. This approach has a long trajectory within the domain of prevention in Denmark, indicating here the more general nature of the state and its ways of operating, where issues such as integration, unemployment, parenting, and social problems have been addressed through training, counseling, and schooling (Gilliam and Gulløv, 2017).
The CVE model was put on the municipal budgets in Aarhus in 2013 and implemented in the day-to-day service of the municipality and police. The model was run by the Infohouse, which in 2016 consisted of two police officers, their police commissioner, three social workers, and a number of ad hoc collaborators from the public child and youth sector. However, concerns about radicalization were not restricted to the police, but involved frontline workers who were in close contact with potentially radicalized individuals, such as teachers, SSP workers, and social workers. A telephone hotline was opened to the police, through which these employees could engage in early warning.
The development of the model in Aarhus was backed by the first Danish national action plan against radicalization in 2009, and further reinforced with a revision of the action plan in 2014, which pointed to Aarhus as a pioneer city in the development of Danish CVE measures (Lindekilde, 2015). The “Aarhus Model” became known as the national “Danish Model” with the 2014 revisions, when Infohouses were implemented in all Danish police districts.
The epidemiological approach
The working group designed the Aarhus Model on the basis of the already existing crime preventive strategy in Aarhus municipality, which resembled the public health rationality of the WHO model for preventing epidemics: Police commissioner: We thought, why reinvent the wheel and why change what is already working? So, the designing of the CVE strategy built on the WHO model and the SSP-partnership model, as well as its legal framework for exchanging information […] because this worked well with regard to crime prevention, and in the end that is what CVE is about. In the 1980s, we [the municipal public health department] applied the WHO model to combat substance abuse, and because we worked in the child and youth sector this model soon migrated to the wider social and security policy domain… It simply made sense to think of crime susceptibility through this model.
When the municipality and police used the WHO model to conjure up notions of vulnerability within the context of CVE, the process implied that the phenomenon of radicalization was understood to be spreading in ways that could be targeted from an epidemiological approach: Consultant: It is not as if we see radicalization as a SIKA virus. But we do approach it from an epidemiological perspective, that is right […] It is interesting, if you think about it that way – that what we do is treating symptoms.
The reconfiguration of urban policing in Aarhus
The diffusion of risk categories
The police received the report of concern about the schoolchildren praying in Aarhus at the beginning of 2016. The reports made to the Infohouse varied in content, but they all focused on rather stereotypical images of the Other in Denmark. Since 2013, 330 reports had been filed through the Infohouse, and a similar number of reports had been rejected on the grounds of irrelevance. Out of these 330 reports, 20 cases concerned right-wing extremism and two cases left-wing extremism—the rest were about Muslim religious fundamentalism. The reports of concern were primarily handed in by professionals in the public youth sector. Generally, the signs of concern included: growing a long beard, wearing a headscarf, people joining the local Salafi mosque, young people criticizing the Western way of life, showing interest in the Islamic State, and expressing feelings of alienation toward the Danish society. Basically, these signs constituted a series of fixed signifiers that had been applied to the Arab Muslim part of the population for several decades—rigid narrative structures about the Muslim, ethnic, and socio-economic Other, which had also influenced crime prevention for the last 20 years (Johansen, 2018: 14).
Although the reported “symptoms” of radicalization related to existing scares about the Muslim population, the individuals who were reported differed increasingly from the familiar iconic figure of the young immigrant man from high-risk neighborhoods. According to the police, this change came as a surprise and introduced new uncertainties relating to the risk assessment of cases of concern. The police were dealing with three major risk groups: The first group was the “green” population, such as schoolchildren and staff who would benefit from awareness courses; the second group was the “yellow” population, such as the schoolchildren praying, who were in alleged need of support and surveillance; and the third was the “red” population, primarily comprising Danish foreign fighters in alleged need of reformation.
The traffic of Danish foreign fighters to the civil war in Syria began in 2010, peaked in 2015, and declined rapidly after 2016. When the traffic increased, the police started receiving reports about young women who had left Denmark to engage in the civil war, either with their husbands or on their own. The police also received reports about “ethnic Danish converts,” most of whom were from non-Muslim families. The largest number of reports came from one of the local high schools and pointed to bright high-school students from so-called resourceful families, i.e. middle-class citizens of various ethnic backgrounds, including Danish. The total number of foreign fighters was small: around 29 individuals from the city of Aarhus left for Syria between 2010 and 2016, and a considerably large proportion of this group consisted of “unfamiliar” cases like women, middle-class students, and ethnic Danish young men. The foreign fighters came to constitute a new risk group, and the need for new risk indicators became apparent because previous fixed categories relating to gender, social class, and race proved to be insufficient. Instead of (only) facing angry young immigrant men from poor immigrant neighborhoods, the police found themselves dealing with young women or adolescents who felt enlightened and happy because they had found God and had future prospects. Hence, what emerged as the only stabile categorical risk component was religion. Yet, in the context of the liberal democratic welfare state, this component is of course difficult to handle since it conflicts with key constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, a right that the police officers would refer to in their discrimination of information during the casework. The police officers in the Infohouse thus pointed out that they were dealing with something new, and they were explicitly concerned with dilemmas involved in walking the thin line between “mind policing” and the prevention of a terror attack: Police officer: What we experience is that there is a major difference between the young people who enter the gang exit program, and those who enter the anti-radicalization program. Whereas gang members seek us to get help because they genuinely want to survive a criminal and violent milieu, the radicals are much more hesitant about what they ought to exit. In most cases, Islam has offered them a way out of petty crime, and feeling of significance, or a way into a faith community, even marriage and family. It takes so much more persuasion – you can even say a kind of manipulation of their worldview – to get them to realize what they need to do. This challenges the mentoring process and it raises questions to where you draw the line.
The concept of belonging has gained a firm foothold in Danish immigration policies during the past decade. The term has become a political indicator of successful integration and a legal notion applied in the granting of permanent citizenship in Denmark. Questions of belonging have become part of the security discourse in the merger between the criminal justice system and integration policies. As noted by Modest and De Koning (2016), questions of belonging are indeed central to current European nationalistic immigration policies and revolve around fears about the intrusion of “strangers” in what is imagined as a racial and culturally homogeneous national space (Modest and De Koning, 2016: 99). The notion of belonging has also gained prominence within Danish psychotherapeutic counseling of immigrants, where it conjures up a model on what counts as a “good enough life” in mainstream society (Bertelsen, 2015). This particular approach has been instrumentalized in the development of a complex counseling measure in the Aarhus Model and has served as the primary epistemological background for the application of “belonging” as a fixed categorical indicator of risk in the work of the Infohouse.
The notion of belonging became the primary reason for focusing on the case involving the schoolchildren praying. The report was primarily about one of the two boys, since he had caused concerns among the school staff a few years earlier when his parents divorced and he was in a state of crisis. At that time, the school staff worried that he was suicidal, and efforts were made to secure his wellbeing and safety in the school and at home. This information was brought up by a school representative who was invited to attend one of the meetings in the Infohouse. He emphasized that the boy’s parents were “well-integrated” since they were in employment, there were no case files on family members in the social services, and there were no criminal record on the boy’s siblings. Then the Infohouse staff discussed the residential area of the boy’s parents; the father lived in the middle-class neighborhood of the school district, and his mother had moved to one of the nearby social housing estates. Finally, they turned to consider the boy’s ethnic background, and his religious practices (and those of his parents) were scrutinized. It was concluded that he was not at risk of radicalization in his home, since the parents were not reported to be orthodox and the family was eager to collaborate. The staff returned to discuss the parents’ divorce, and the discussion eventually centered upon questions of belonging. Did the boy feel a lack of belonging in the family after his parents divorced? Could he be “seeking pastures new” in a social environment where he could be exposed to radicalization? This was highlighted by the school representative at the meeting: I am concerned about the wellbeing of this boy, if he feels alienated and a lack of belonging in the family due to the parents’ divorce. He has shown to be vulnerable during the divorce, when he expressed an experience of dis-attachment in the family, and he may be easily allured to engaging with the wrong kind of people.
Expansion of institutional infrastructures
The multi-sectorial approach of the Danish Model builds on a long tradition of cross-disciplinary collaboration in the Danish welfare state. In many respects, it resembles what Gressgård (2016), discussing the situation in Sweden, has defined as the expanded cohesion agenda at the nexus between criminal justice, welfare provision, and integration. Gressgård (2016) has argued that expansive Swedish security policies—including partnership agreements between the police and local authorities—conflate welfare provision with crime prevention in specific neighborhoods, thus “rendering entire subpopulations legible as ‘dangerous’ others against which society, or the city, must be defended” (9). The trajectories of the Danish cohesion agenda and the intersection between welfare, crime prevention, and security can be traced back to the establishment of the municipal SSP-partnership in the 1980s. The Danish Model was designed to reflect the SSP-partnership. However, two major changes were made in cross-sectorial collaboration when the Aarhus Model was implemented.
The first change related to the extent of the network and the reach of the state. Danish CVE measures have generated an increasing expansion of the infrastructure of control in the big cities, since responsibility for monitoring and behavior detection has been partly decentralized, enrolling a range of new state agents in policing practices. Whereas crime prevention has primarily been based on the SSP-partnership, and the expansion of this organization has only been on an ad hoc basis, the CVE strategy relied on a much wider infrastructure. The Danish Model engaged frontline workers, as well as parents and relatives, as preventive agents and depended on the frontline as a monitoring system. The report of concern about the two schoolchildren praying illustrates the transformation with new institutions turning into what we could call check-points in the detection of suspicious signs.
The second change that was made related to the constellation of the institutional network and relations of information exchange. With the implementation of CVE measures in Danish municipalities, groups of professionals became engaged in reporting radicalization, most often as an effect of their duty to report concerns about the wellbeing of children (National Center for Countering Violent Extremism, 2018). Danish citizens and state officials do not have a specific legal duty to report radicalization like in the UK, where the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act of 2015 places a duty on specified authorities to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism (the Prevent duty). However, Danish state officials and welfare professionals have a legal duty to report concerns about the mis-thriving and safety of children and the social services have always been the primary receiver of these reports. 5 In cases on radicalization, the Danish Model changed this direction of information exchange from the social services to the police, via police hotlines, thereby engaging reporting professionals and citizens in issues of security rather than welfare. The reporting of radicalization implied a different sense of severity, since this arrangement was not only about the safety of an individual child but also about the safety of the public in the face of an alleged terror threat. One social worker in the Infohouse described this change as a bureaucratic enhancement: “This is what I really like about my job in the Infohouse, the smooth processing of cases because they are taken seriously by people I collaborate with.”
In a similar vein, the responsibility of the employees dealing with the risk assessment of reports of concern changed from providing order and welfare to be handling national security—a task that had previously been performed exclusively by the Danish intelligence services. The spreading of counter-radicalization throughout the infrastructure of the Danish welfare system led to a reinforcement of the Danish security–safety nexus (Gressgård, 2016), but it also led to a reconfiguration of relationships within the institutional network. Work procedures and relationships of exchange partly changed, paving the way for new roles and identities in the state apparatus. Police officers became experts who were suddenly responsible for the “policing” of anxious frontline staff, and variously positioned frontline staff became representatives of a policing welfare system who were responsible to some extent for defending the city, the state, and the nation.
De-territorialization of nonsecure spaces
Somewhere in the transition from crime prevention to counter-radicalization, the imaginary landscape of the city started to change as seen from the perspective of the police in Aarhus. The case of the schoolchildren praying illustrates this transformation in several ways. The police’s concerns related not only to the children, but also to the place where they were praying. The staff discussed the alarming spread of radicalization to “resourceful neighborhoods” and well-off children who had “all the opportunities in the world to get a good life.” In this sense, the school emerged as a disturbing new arena of contamination and constituted a new space for the enforcement of order and state authority. To the police, this opening up of new nonsecure spaces represented an unexpected eruption of risk in the city, breaking down the causality of existing emic theories of contamination. The de-territorialization of the threat/risk construct was further reinforced by the depiction of radicalization as being partly “viral,” i.e. a phenomenon that was “leaping” from one part of town to the next without any predictable spatial patterns of transmission. The lack of consistency in the spreading of radicalization, as seen from the perspective of the police, continued to disrupt their understanding of the urban morphology of (in)security, and engagements of control became an ongoing achievement.
The police responded to these particular challenges in several ways. First, the Infohouse was strategically placed in the city center, and when a majority of the police force from the crime preventive department moved out to the “criminal epicenters” in the urban periphery in 2019, the organization around the Aarhus Model and the Infohouse stayed. This decision was based on the argument that the risk of radicalization was not restricted to particular locations, sites, or bodies. Furthermore, there was the problem that the Infohouse police was also responsible for the gang exit program, which could not be placed within potential gang-territories. Hence, the gang exit program and the counter-radicalization program continued to be placed in the city center—the former because it was site-specific and the latter because it needed to be citywide.
Second, the response to the “viral” spreading of radicalization came in the form of an increasing investment in measures against online radicalization, which de-connected policing activities from the urban setting and rendered potential sources and victims of “contamination” less visible within the urban context. While the development of measures against online radicalization is still in the making, the development of monitoring mobility at the frontline of the state has unfolded over the past 10 years, facilitating institutional reporting and embedding security features invisibly into the urban fabric. This is perhaps the most significant official response to the unpredictable spreading of radicalization, which has, in the words of one police officer, “opened up for the possibility of having an eye and an ear open in many places… the strength of which the future will show.”
Conclusion
Critical social scientists have increasingly problematized the fusion between welfare and security, stating that the domain of welfare state policing has become particularly fertile for the reproduction of structures of inequality. This article has demonstrated that to understand the complexity of this process—as well as its potentiality to be challenged and changed from within—we need to look at the friction that sometimes occur between the underlying epistemology of security politics and the ontological world of policing. With a point of departure in the gray array of CVE “borderline cases,” this article has pointed to the way in which security models feed on the imaginary patterns of their objects of intervention, leaving open the possibility that such patterns may be ruptured, de-territorialized, and reconfigured. The Danish Model discussed in this account combines a dialectic strategy of policing in an attempt to overcome such rupture. On the one hand, policing is based on a continuum of existing categories of crime susceptibility and traditional territorial interventions that seek to seal off and monitor certain sites and bodies regarded as targets in the city. During the six years that the police have been dealing with cases on Syrian foreign fighters, they have identified a network of mosques, religious youth associations, and individual religious leaders whom they have classified as high-risk social environments. The mosques have been defined as alleged epicenters of radicalization, and they are located in immigrant neighborhoods, which have already been intensely policed for the last three decades. As such, the mosques are indicative of the persistency of topographical policing in Denmark. On the other hand, cases of concern relating to radicalization occur everywhere, including in urban spaces that have previously been regarded as secure. As a result, policing has changed from being site-specific to becoming emergent as an inert, all-pervasive potentiality. While much research has focused on the first form of security and its social and political implications, less attention has been given to the latter security tendency in Denmark. However, only by taking this new security development into account are we able to understand the highly ambivalent dialectics of current urban policing, where policing practices are simultaneously reinforcing and breaking down existing categorical and territorial boundaries of order and disorder in the city. The concept of epidemic policing, thus, describes an inherently de-territorialized form of security, where the epidemiological object of intervention defies neat categories of risk and is spreading in unpredictable ways, challenging the diagnostic of the phenomenon and the interventions against it. In the Danish case, the security response to all of this is the indefinite expansion of urban policing.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This paper is part of the Special Issue: “Urban Border Work: Ethnographies of Policing”, edited by Maya Mynster Christensen and Peter Alexander Albrecht.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is based on research funded by Norwegian Research Council SAMRISK 238134 and FRIHUMSAM 275947.