My Criminal Friend: Maneuvering Friendships and Abstaining from Crime in High-Risk Areas in Denmark

Abstract

This article highlights the perspective of 39 young men who live and have friends in a Danish high-risk neighborhood. We look into their use of microlevel tactics to socialize with crime-involved friends while managing to abstain from crime. Maintaining this balance was a constant everyday processual negotiation of friendship relations, moral obligations, and risk assessment. However, the most severe consequences of having criminal friends were to endure police control and potentially be known and registered by the police as criminals or ‘gang-affiliated’. In that way, the criminal justice system was deeply entangled in the social lives of these young people.

Keywords

crime desistance ethnic minority youth friendship high-risk areas peer pressure policing

Introduction

A general consensus seems to exist among criminologists that men figure more in the criminal justice system than women, that the young commit more crime than older people, urban residents more than rural, ethnic minority populations more than majority populations, and poor people more than rich (Garot, 2009). Accordingly, poor, young, urban men from ethnic minority backgrounds are viewed as being at high risk for engaging in crime.

In explaining this situation, researchers have often focused on the role of subcultures, and particularly the significance of street cultures (Anderson, 1999; Hagedorn, 2008; Mullin, 2006). These studies have argued that young men, who experience structural exclusion from the formal labor market or the educational system, may engage in street cultures and crime as alternative means of achieving social status and recognition (Sandberg and Pedersen, 2011). Street cultures are often based on the formations of close-knit friendship ties, a sense of shared destiny, or ‘neighbourhood nationalism’ (Back, 1996), and collective values, which are in opposition to the values of mainstream society (Lalander, 2016). By engaging in street culture and reproducing the ‘code of the street’, including the willingness to engage in crime and violence, young men can achieve a street-based social status (Anderson, 1999).

An alternative line of research in attempting to explain young people’s attraction and involvement in crime has focused on the role of peer and peer pressure. Researchers have shown that affiliating with those peers, who engage in antisocial and illegal behavior, is one of the most robust risk factors for delinquency, substance use and offending during adolescence and young adulthood (Haynie, 2001; Pyrooz et al., 2016; Warr and Stafford, 1991). Peers are divided into two overall categories: those involved in crime and those who are not. While crime-involved peers and ‘peer pressure’ are often conceptualized as ‘antisocial’ pressures and key negative risk factors, nondelinquent and noncriminal peers are viewed as protective and ‘prosocial’ factors (Walters, 2020). Cutting ties with deviant peers and having prosocial friendship relations has therefore been highlighted as important in reducing the likelihood of criminal involvement (Lonardo et al., 2009).

One aspect of this theme of peer pressure and criminal involvement has been emphasized more recently by researchers in the United Kingdom, who have highlighted the ways in which marginalized young men’s pathways into drug crimes are sometimes the result of criminal exploitation, where older and more criminally experienced individuals groom or force their less experienced peers into drug selling in order to profit from their criminal labor (Harding, 2020; McLean et al., 2019; Moyle, 2019). This theme has also been noted in research in Denmark (the empirical focus of this article), albeit to a lesser extent (Søgaard et al., 2021).

Nonetheless, the majority of young men living in marginalized neighborhoods, characterized by ethno-racial and economic stratification and relatively high levels of crime, rarely get involved in offending (Gunter, 2008; Lindegaard and Zimmermann, 2017), and while much research exists on the risks posed to) marginalized young men of ethno-racial minority backgrounds, and the crimes committed, few studies have paid attention to young men’s attempt to avoid crime (Garot, 2009, 2010; Lindegaard and Zimmermann, 2017).

Hence, while street culture and deviant peers can play a key role in facilitating criminal involvement, we should be cautious in adopting a too deterministic approach. Qualitative research, for instance, have shown that street culture is only one cultural repertoire, among a diverse range, that marginalized young men can draw on (Harding, 2010), and competent code performances, including code switching (Anderson, 1999; Benoit et al., 2003), can play a key role in young men’s ability to associate with criminally involved peers, without necessarily being involved in criminal behavior themselves (Harding, 2009; Lindegaard and Zimmermann, 2017). Moreover, a few studies have shown that young people trying to desist from criminal activities, such as illicit drug use, are nevertheless sometimes reluctant to relinquish their drug using and criminally involved friends. Instead, they negotiate friendship relations in ways that enable them to maintain friends, while desisting from drug use (Herold and Søgaard, 2019) or other criminal activities (Garot, 2010). Given these findings, studies within the drug field (Herold and Søgaard, 2019) have argued that if we are to develop a more nuanced understanding of young peoples’ efforts to abstain from drugs and crime, we need to focus more fully on their everyday negotiations of their friendship relations. Specifically, the cognitive and microlevel tactics that enable them to disengage from drug use while maintaining close relationships with drug using friends.

In this article, we argue that adopting such a perspective, that highlights young peoples’ own point of view and the processual nature of friendship relations, can be useful in shedding new light on some of the processes through which marginalized young people, living in high-crime neighborhoods, attempt to abstain from crime. This article is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with young ethnic minority men living in three marginalized neighborhoods in Denmark, where youth-crime rates are higher than in other parts of the country. Consequently, these young men are more likely to have peers in their social circle, with criminal experiences because they have grown up together and more likely to have joined in the same school and leisure activities. This article examines the range and diversity of everyday tactics used by our participants in their efforts to abstain from crime, while nevertheless maintaining close friendship relations with their criminally involved friends. We explore the extent to which these tactics include (1) performances of ‘flexible cultural repertoires’ (Lindegaard and Zimmermann, 2017), that is, shifts between ‘street’ and ‘decent’ scripts (Anderson, 1999), depending on whether they are in the neighborhood or at work or in educational settings; (2) social and situational boundary work, enabling the young participants to dissociate themselves from the criminal parts of their friends’ lives; and (3) cognitive tactics used to handle the moral dilemma of caring for friends while knowing that they are involved in doing ‘bad things’. Finally, we discuss how socializing with criminally involved friends can nevertheless entail a number of risks for ‘desisters’, including accidentally getting mixed up in criminal incidents or being labeled as ‘criminal’ or ‘gang affiliated’ by the police.

Theoretical Framing

In order to explore how young ethnic minority men negotiate their friendship relations as part of an effort to abstain from crime, we draw analytical inspiration from qualitative studies on criminal desistance (Carlsson, 2012; Maruna, 2001; Weaver, 2012, 2013). While much desistance research focuses on self-identifying offenders, and their attempt to break with criminal careers, we believe that adopting a desistance perspective may be useful in exploring how individuals with only little, or no criminal history, attempt to abstain from crime in contexts and social relationships where criminal involvement is relatively normalized.

Traditionally, research on criminal desistance has been dominated by life-course perspectives and an interest in how changes in an individual’s socio-cultural context, such as entry into marriage, employment or change of peer group can function as drivers in desistance processes (Laub and Sampson, 2006). However, more recently criminologists have suggested that desistance is not just about transformations in offenders’ circumstances, but also involves agency and (inter-)subjective processes (Maruna, 2001). Mindful of the fact that desistance is often best viewed as a work-in-progress, involving a ‘zigzag’ process characterized by lapse and relapse, and thus reflecting Matza’s (1964) concept of ‘drift’, Maruna recommends that we see desistance as a kind of maintenance process and that research should focus on ‘the maintenance of crime-free behavior in the face of life’s obstacles and frustrations’ (Maruna, 2001: 26). To this, one could also add the notion of ‘temptations’ (Katz, 1988). Research that focuses on the role of agency in desistance processes has outlined how desistors often draw on a range of cognitive and microlevel tactics to stay clear of crime. These involve reworking one’s self-perception, attempts to reconstruct more prosocial identities and different forms of border-works, for instance, when desistors symbolically cut off morally dubious past selves (Carlsson, 2012; Maruna, 2001). Complementing these findings, Weaver (2012) has argued that a key element in desistors’ effort to maintain crime-free behavior involves a reworking of their intimate friendship relationships. Such a reworking can both involve social border-work, where desistors dissociate from certain ‘bad’ friends or specific aspects of these friends’ lives, and also adopt new roles, for instance, by becoming a high school student, or getting a job. This process may also be based on friend’s reciprocal support to help them stay out of crime (Weaver, 2012, 2013).

Obviously, the context and the desistance tasks may be different between those individuals, who have a long criminal career, and those who face risks of initiating a criminal career. Nevertheless, we argue that a focus on individuals’ use of cognitive and socially embedded microtactics can also help us understand how the latter attempt to maintain crime-free behaviors. Understanding such processes is particularly important in socioeconomically deprived contexts where criminal behavior is both relatively normalized and trivialized, thereby creating a situation where peer pressure might exist and where there are plentiful opportunities for young people to sporadically get involved in delinquency and petty crime, but also more rarely in serious crime (Gunter, 2008). In such contexts, young people’s pathway into delinquency and crime is often facilitated by a process of ‘drift’, involving affinity (proximity to criminal opportunities), affiliation (social relations) and signification (i.e., temporary neutralizations of conventional moral restraints) (Matza, 1964). Drift should not be seen as the direct cause of delinquency/crime, but rather as the underlying process that makes the individual ‘available for delinquent acts’ (Matza, 1964: 89). Importantly, while drift creates the potential for delinquency and crime, the delinquent/criminal act is only realized when a young person exercises will, or agency (Carlsson, 2018). In young people’s doing crime, conditions of possibility and agency are thus connected. Just as drift into crime involves aspects of agency, so too does young people’s attempt to ‘drift out of crime’ (Carlsson, 2018), and their attempt to abstain from becoming involved in crime in the first place.

In our analysis, we focus on how our young participants’ active attempt to stay out of crime, are set within a context of structural constraints. While our participants aspired toward conventionally validated pathways to educational, career and material success, many were, compelled to live and spend much of their time in low-rent and high-crime areas. Not only were they financially dependent on their low-income parents, many also felt culturally excluded from mainstream Danish society. In this context, moving to another area and cutting ties with lifelong, but criminally involved friends, becomes difficult. Hence, we show that while some of our participants did cut ties with criminally involved peers as an attempt to stay clear of crime, the majority developed a repertoire of actions that enabled them to combine their aspirations of conventional notions of success, with a local rootedness, including keeping friendship-relations with criminally involved friends.

More specifically, we describe how code switching, involving situational and strategic shifts between a ‘street code’ and a ‘decent code’ (Anderson, 1999), play a key role in our participants’ attempt to desist from crime while maintaining social ties with criminally involved friends. While other studies have focused on how code switching is sometimes used by conformist young people to avoid violence (Anderson, 1999) or by street-oriented young people to portray a ‘ decent’ image (Benoit et al., 2003; Sandberg and Pedersen, 2011), we show how our participants creatively draw on heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory cultural repertoires (Lindegaard and Zimmermann, 2017) to manage the difficult social, legal, and moral dilemmas of having and identifying with criminally involved friends while adhering to mainstream society norms and values. Finally, our research participants’ attempts to negotiate their friendships while abstaining from crime should be seen in a Danish context, where ethnic minority young men are disproportionately targeted by the police and where intensified policy measures and a high level of policing have been introduced in socioeconomically deprived areas with high percentages of ethnic minority citizens.

The Danish Context

Nordic research has shown that ethnic minority young people are disproportionately targets of a ‘police gaze’ (Finstad, 2000) and experience intensified police control (Haller et al., 2020a, 2020b; Nielsen et al., 2019; Saarikkomäki et al., 2021; Solhjell et al., 2019). Such a ‘police gaze’ and pro-active police work is based on typologies where certain citizens appear more suspicious to the police than others, because of characteristics such as age, ethnic origin, and clothing (Holmberg, 2003). Hence, groups of young immigrants often attract the attention of the police (Ansel-Henry and Jespersen, 2003; Holmberg, 2003: 59; Kammersgaard et al., 2021) and consequently, they risk becoming ‘criminal by association’ if they hang out with criminal or gang-related friends, engage in ‘street-culture’ or live in high-risk areas. Studies have shown that ethnic minority youth are more likely, than those with a Danish background, to be arrested and charged, without this leading to a conviction (Holmberg and Kyvsgaard, 2003; Nielsen et al., 2019).

In the past 20 years, there has been an increase in the societal, media-, and political focus on young people with ethnic minority backgrounds living in deprived areas in Denmark (Freiesleben, 2016; Nielsen et al., 2019). These neighborhoods have been referred to by some politicians as ‘ghettoes’ and ‘parallel societies’ and have been discursively constructed as segregated, Muslim, immigrant societies in opposition to mainstream society (Freiesleben, 2016: 87). In deprived neighborhoods, the crime rate is about three times higher than in the rest of Denmark (Danish National Police, 2019). However, it is a small minority, who commit the majority of crime in these neighborhoods (5% of the residents commit 71% of the criminal acts in the areas). However, the crime level has in fact declined significantly the past 10 years (Danish National Police, 2019).

Since 2010, the Danish government has published a yearly ‘ghetto list’ of deprived neighborhoods, which have been characterized by low levels of education and average income, high crime and unemployment rates and a high number (more than 50%) of non-Western immigrant residents or their descendants (Government, 2017b). In the Governmental plan ‘Strategy against Ghettoization’ (Government, 2004), these areas were described as ‘ethnic enclaves or parallel societies without significant economic, social or cultural contact to the rest of the society’ (Government, 2004: 12).

Alongside the ghetto-list, there have been special initiatives to fight group related and youth crime in the areas, described as a ‘firm, focused, and consequent reaction towards troubled youth’ (Government, 2018). Consequently, Danish governments have introduced some drastic control measures aimed at residents living in the ‘ghettoes’. These include, for instance, intensification of police-presence and stop-and-and search procedures, severe punishment for crime committed in the areas as well as 28 specific initiatives to fight gangs and gang-related crime, such as increased use of stop and search zones and double punishment for gang-related crime (Government, 2017a). Combined with this followed more intense police registration of persons related to gangs. Our participants all lived in one of these ‘ghetto areas’ and their lives and friendship relations were, in different ways, affected by the political initiatives. Within this article, we hope to illuminate some of the unintended consequences that political categorizations and crime-reducing initiatives have on non-criminal young people who live in marginalized neighborhoods in Denmark.

Method and Data

This article is based on interviews with 39 participants (33 men and 6 women), who have little or no criminal experiences. They all live and have close friends in one of three neighboring areas, recently classified as ‘ghettoes’. As these three local areas are closely connected, we refer to them under the single pseudonym of ‘Ingevang’.

The interviews were part of a broader research project which focused on ethnic minority young men in marginalized neighborhoods and their perceptions of the police. Between 2016 and 2017, we interviewed 82 young people¹ (76 men and 6 women) between the ages of 15–26 living in three neighboring areas. Out of these, 28 of our participants reported that they had committed many criminal acts and some of them were also gang affiliated and involved in drug-delivery businesses (see also Søgaard et al., 2019). Eleven of our participants had few experiences of criminal activities and 28 had no criminal experiences at all (15 participants did not reveal whether they had criminal experiences or not). This article is based on the interviews with those with little or no experiences with crime.

Initially, the coding was based on agreed coding categories and then modified as new emerging themes appeared. In analyzing the data, we realized that many of the participants, who were not involved in criminality, had many vicarious experiences with their friends’ criminal activities and experiences of being stopped by the police. On examining more, these emerging themes, 17 of our participants were reinterviewed individually or in different focus groupings. The structure of the focus group interviews were relatively loose and some participants were somewhat difficult to interview. For example, some left (and came back later) because they could not concentrate for long or because they were impatient, busy or had to smoke. Others were initially skeptical about our research project and wanted to assess us and the project prior to participating. Switching between individual and group interviews gave us the possibility to explore and compare individual and collective perspectives on emerging themes, such as friendship and crime. We realized that these friendship groups often consisted of a diverse mixture of young men with some having no education, others enrolled in high school or other educational institutions. Some involved in criminal activities, and others with no criminal experience. However, what began to emerge was that their different involvement in crime seemed not to be a factor that necessarily challenged their friendships.

While the vast majority of our research participants were born in Denmark (except for two), and all but two of them had parents with a non-Danish national background (primarily originating from Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, or Iraq), they nevertheless had somewhat different backgrounds, life experiences, occupations, and different experiences with crime and the police. To interview such a socially mixed group of young people, we recruited participants from different settings, such as a local library, a local youth club, a gymnasium, a preparatory basic education school, a local employment project, and finally a local shopping mall. We also recruited young people on the streets. We also placed adverts in local newspapers and distributed leaflets. Finally, we used snowball sampling techniques (Biernacki and Waldorf, 1981), and referrals from social workers or others who had contact with young people living in the area.

Our semistructured interview guide consisted of open-ended questions focusing on themes such as everyday life, job/education, and personal and friends’ experiences with crime, the police, and drug use. The interviews also included additional themes, which the participant’s introduced during the interview, such as friendship relations and vicarious experiences. Participation was voluntary and participants received a gift voucher of 150 DKK (20 Euro) for their participation. All informants were informed about the project by the interviewer and received a document with a brief description of the project including our contact information in case they had questions or regrets. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim and subsequently coded with the data analysis software program NVivo 11. The participants and all identifying information are anonymized and the project complies with guidelines for ethical research in Denmark.

In the following sections, we first describe the broader context: Experiences and implications of living and having friends in a high-crime, ‘ghetto area’ such as ‘Ingevang’ including their ideas of identity and social norms. Second, we outline the different ‘tactics’ used by the young participants to balance the dilemma of wanting to maintain friendships with crime-involved friends, while wishing to avoid becoming involved in crime themselves. Finally, we examine the consequences of being involved in friendships with crime-involved friends.

Results

Friendship groups

Many of our research participants were part of close groups of friends, who had known each other since childhood. Such friendship groups were often described in family terms (‘people you are born and bred with’) including fictive kin and belonging to Ingevang. Moreover, these friendships were linked to a ‘solidarity based on destiny’, a common experience from having to navigate two different cultures, being multilingual, and a sense of disassociation with mainstream Denmark (Ansel-Henry and Jespersen, 2003). Some friends were connected because their parents shared immigrant experiences or had the same ethnic background; some described how they and their friends had spent all their time together since childhood. This in part was also due to the fact that many had grown up in low-income families, where the parents’ lack of economic resources meant that they were unable to move to other more affluent city areas. As the participants had grown older, they gradually began to hang out together in the streets or at youth clubs. For some, this was also the time when they chose their way in life. Choosing to follow different pathways in life was clearly expressed by a young man in the following quote:

Yusuf:

When you finish school and find out what you want to do, people divide. There are three groups: those who commit crime, those who try to pull themselves together in school and those who are already in control and who are teachers today and so on. They have moved up in society. (Male 17. Interview).

Although the young people chose different directions in life, many maintained their relations with and loyalty to childhood friends, despite their friends becoming involved in crime. Many of our research participants managed to stay out of crime while maintaining good relations with criminally involved friends by using ‘code switching’ (Anderson, 1999; Harding, 2009; Lindegaard and Zimmermann, 2017). When outside their neighborhood, they complied with mainstream society norms, but once back in their own neighborhood, with their friends they to adhered, to some extent, to the cultural code of the street. By successfully navigating between the norms operating inside and those outside the ‘ghetto’ the young men, who were not or only minimally involved in crime, believed that they could benefit from both spheres.

Muhammed:

If you play your cards right, then you can – with the right competencies – be accepted as an equal citizen in a civilized society [outside the ‘ghetto’] and at the same time live here and have contact to many people – whether they are criminal or not – and be recognized for doing good. I will be recognized and can talk to them [criminal friends] about everything. They [criminal friends] are not afraid of revealing anything to me because they know I won’t call the police. So, there’s still a confidence in me even though I don’t contribute to the bad companies. (Male 19. Focus group interview, 4 participants)

Hence, maintaining friendships with criminal friends involved a careful consideration of the potential consequences, as well as negotiating different norms in addition to the adoption of different tactics.

Abstaining from Crime While Keeping in Contact with Crime-Involved Friends

In simultaneously trying to maintain relations with their criminally involved friends while avoiding becoming involved in crime themselves, they adopted strategies that involved performing ‘flexible cultural repertoires’ (Lindegaard and Zimmermann, 2017: 194–195). These repertoires included the following strategies.

No snitching

One of the most essential signs of loyalty and one of the most important codes to adhere to, in maintaining a friendship, was the refusal to snitch on friends. This value, which has been identified as a key trait of the street code (Anderson, 1999; Sandberg and Pedersen, 2011), is unequivocally expressed in the following:

Interviewer:

If you see something criminal here, would you then call the police?

Muhammed:

No!

Interviewer:

You laugh. Why do you do that?

Hussein:

Because if you see someone committing crime, then it’s your friends. (Male 19 and male 18. Focus group interview, 4 participants)

However, outside their own neighborhood, they complied with mainstream society norms, including reporting to the police an observed crime. However, when with friends in the neighborhood, they maintained loyalty. Not snitching was partly used to protect their friends but also a technique of being considerate to their friends’ relatives.

Interviewer:

When you don’t want to tell the truth [to the police about a criminal incident], is that to protect your friend? That you don’t think he deserves the punishment he will get?

Yusuf:

I don’t feel sorry for him [criminal friend]. But anyway. . . I feel sorry for his mum and his family. Because he’s in high school and if his mum doesn’t see him for three or two years (. . .). After two years in prison, where you have only been with criminals, then you are fucked up and you can’t start school. (. . .) then your life is ruined. (Male 17. Interview)

Even though they adhered to society norms saying that criminals deserve some kind of punishment, they also avoided assisting the police because they believed it would worsen their friends’ situation. Thus, the above indicates how there is not always a clear line between ‘decent’ and ‘street’ values (see also Benoit et al., 2003), and how these values were in practice often intertwined.

‘None of my business’

A second tactic used by our participants was to refrain from judging or commenting on problematic elements of their friends’ lives and activities. In this way, they did not need to take a moral stand that could potentially lead to a conflict with their friends. A norm expressed both implicitly and explicitly in several of the interviews was that one is only responsible for one’s own choices in life, whether this implied being involved in criminal or gang activities or getting an education or legal work. Being involved in crime then, was regarded as a personal matter and people’s own business, at least as long as one did not pressure others to get involved.

Mahmood:

(. . .) I came and greeted the boys. I don’t care who’s in gangs and who’s not. It’s none of my business. (. . .) I know them and I greet them nicely and they greet me. What they do in their leisure time is up to them. One thing I love about this place out here is that everyone knows each other and respect one another. What he does and what she does, that’s not something you interfere with. Every man minds his own business. We respect one another and talk to each other (. . .) You do what you like, as long as you don’t say to me: ’Come, let’s go out and steal’ or ’we should sell drugs together’. (Male 27. Interview)

With this approach–that others were free to make their own choices in life–friendships could continue despite their friends’ criminal involvement. Furthermore, Mahmood pragmatically and straightforwardly concluded that

I go to school and what we do in our spare-time we do on our spare-time. While I am in school, he [friend] sells [drugs]. Then we meet in our leisure time and then (. . .) he’s done his thing, yeah. And then, maybe in the night or something, he has to go to a customer or two. (Male 27. Interview)

A key theme in this section is the way in which these young people attempt to manage the moral dilemma involved in liking and caring for friends while knowing their criminal involvement. The norms expressed in utterances like ‘it’s none of my business’ or ‘it’s people’s own business’ made it possible for our participants to maintain relations even though their friends were involved in criminal activities. However, the ideal of not interfering in friends’ activities could also be seen as a cognitive strategy making it possible for our research participants to cope with potential moral dilemmas. By deliberately ignoring certain aspects of their friends’ lives, our participants did not have to adopt a moral stance. A key finding in desistance research is that former offenders often symbolically cut off their former selves (see, for example, Maruna, 2001), for instance, by saying ‘I was different then, it was not the real me’. While the young men in our study are not cutting off their past selves, they are nevertheless cutting off problematic parts of their friends’ lives. By doing that, they were able to maintain a coherent moral narrative. This tactic of cutting off problematic elements of their friends’ lives and activities, can also be seen as acts of delimitation. According to Carvalho and Lewis (2003), delimitation is a process that occurs with a deep understanding of the ways in which crime functions and is practiced in everyday life. With this understanding crime become less random and appear less dangerous, because crime become restricted to certain spheres (e.g., places, times of the day, groups of people) that can be actively avoided by those who do not wish to be involved (Carvalho and Lewis, 2003: 794). As shown in this section, delimiting acts of crime from ordinary life was not only practiced by our young participants, who wished to stay out of crime, but also by their criminally involved friends, who did not wish to put their friends at risk by exposing them to crime.

Knowing without knowing

Related to the above tactic is the strategy of deliberately remaining unaware of or showing no interest in their friends’ criminal activities.

For Trine and Abdal, it was a matter of how much you knew. They were classmates at the local gymnasium and had many acquaintances who sold drugs. But, in order not to get involved, they deliberately remained ‘selectively knowledgeable’ about their friends’ activities.

Trine:

It’s not something you talk about. It also depends on what they sell. If it’s weed we can talk openly about it. If it’s a harder drug we don’t talk about it.

Abdal:

No, you don’t dare to talk about it. You don’t want to interfere and become part of it. You have to stay away from it.

Trine:

Is it something you are involved in?

Abdal:

No, I’m not involved in it but if the police caught those I know, then I think I would be charged for not saying anything. Because you have a duty. If you know someone does something illegal, you have to say it. Or else you are an accomplice to some degree. (Female 18 and male 18. Group interview, 2 participants)

Trine, who was an ethnic Dane, and had moved to Ingevang from a suburban middle-class neighborhood, was caught in a dilemma between being faithful to her new criminal friends while dealing with the moral obligations of a decent citizen. ‘Not knowing’ or selectively knowing about her friends’ criminal activities was a strategy to overcome this dilemma. In addition, the strategy of not asking friends about their activities is not just a matter of protecting oneself from incriminating information, it is also a way to communicate to criminally involved friends that: ‘I do not want to get involved’. Moreover, it is a way of constructing an identity of being non-criminally involved in opposition to one’s criminally involved friends. Many of our participants noted that such a strategy was respected by their criminal friends and that their friends were considerate about not involving their law-abiding friends in case it could potentially cause problems.

Maintaining a reputation as someone, who was not interested in being involved in criminal activities, is a self-protective strategy that was widely respected among our participants’ criminal friends. Contrary to studies that show how gang-related young people sometimes groom peers to become involved in the drug trade (see McLean et al., 2019), findings from our study suggest that many of our participants felt that their gang-related friends were very considerate about not involving their law-abiding friends.

Omar:

I know this entire gang but I have never been asked. They know that I don’t have any problems so they don’t want me to be involved. They won’t even ask me (. . .). They know I can’t be persuaded. There’s no reason for them to ask me. (Male 18. Interview)

‘Pedagogue friend’

Contrary to the tactics of ‘none of my business’ and ‘not knowing’ about friends’ criminal activities, another tactic used by some of our participants was to offer advice to friends about the potential risk related to their criminal activities. For example, Isaam was in education, but often hung out with his criminally involved friends in his leisure time. He had inside knowledge about their life and business and used this knowledge to comment on their wrongdoings and help them in the right direction. As he said: ‘I’m in the middle of everything [crime] but not involved’. When interviewed together with his friends, who were heavily involved in gang-related drug sales, Isaam employed the same street codes as his friends; appearance, style of clothes, dialect, attitude, etc. He could also describe the strategies and practices of selling drugs and being gang-affiliated. However, he carefully managed the balance between committing petty crime (he smoked cannabis) and what he understood as ‘real’ crime (selling drugs and being gang related). However, hanging out with his criminal childhood friends meant that he ran the risk of being involved in their criminal activities and hence targeted by the police. Moreover, hanging out with gang-related friends also meant that he was unable to visit family members who lived in a different neighborhood ‘belonging’ to a conflicting gang. However, Isaam expressed sympathy and care for his friends and found that it was his responsibility to try to have his friends change their way of life.

Isaam:

Some [his friends] are faced with a big dilemma and don’t know what to do. Sometimes I’m called a kind of pedagogue by my friends. Because I think, that if no-one in the group says: ‘No, this isn’t good’, then they [his friends] will continue to do a lot of [wrong] stuff. It’s not good for a group of friends if everyone just say ‘yes’ to things because someone wants it. There has to be someone who says ‘no’ and chooses to go another way. Someone like me, (. . .). People [his friends] don’t consider the consequences of their acts. (Male 18. Interview)

In this way, Isaam took on a similar role to that of the ‘wounded-healer’ described in the desistance literature (Maruna, 2001), helping his friends to get out of crime. Though Isaam and other participants, who employed the same tactics were not ‘wounded’–as they have not had a criminal career–taking care of friends could be a possible way of abstaining from crime while still keeping crime-involved friends (see also Kolind et al., 2017).

The case of Isaam also illustrates that being involved in criminal activities is not a case of either being or not being criminal. Rather, it should be seen as a constant everyday processual negotiation of roles and relations. Even though people like Isaam might be able to manage the shifts between ‘street’ and ‘decent’ scripts, depending on whether he is with his criminal friends or at work/education, impression management was not entirely in his hands. His criminal friends might regard him as their law abiding ‘pedagogue friend’ who manage to achieve an education. However, from the perspectives of his fellow students, he might be regarded as the criminal guy from the ‘ghetto’. In that way, he is somewhat caught in-between two normative and behavioral spheres, which could be mutually exclusive.

Ending friendship

Whereas most of our research participants strived to maintain their childhood friendships without being involved in criminal activities themselves, a few chose to quit their relations to their criminal friends. For example, Jamaal, who was about to start a Ph.D. education, had, like most of our participants, grown up in Ingevang. He described how he had ‘(. . .) witnessed people stealing, smashing cars and other stuff, so I had [crime] around me’. However, according to him: ‘I had my parents to guide me and be there for me. That’s the difference between me and the others’. He adhered to his father’s motto: ‘Before I can be accepted in the Danish society, I have to be better than the best Dane’. In pursuing this ideal, Jamaal’s strategy was to avoid his friends and distance himself from them:

I avoid all of them today. First of all, because the intellectual level is so low among them. They can only talk about women or cars or football. It is boring in the long run. I would rather talk to people that I can have a conversation or a discussion with. I think you become like those you hang out with. I don’t want people to think that I am like them or will be influenced to be like them. (Male 25. Interview)

Already in 9th grade, Jamaal decided to be ‘better friends with those in the 9th grade (the Danes) and less friends with the immigrants’ (Interview, Male 25). Today, Jamaal still has his ‘Danish’ friends from secondary school and, in contrast to the other participants in this study, he had completely severed his old friendships.

The Consequences of Criminal Friendship

In general, our research participants managed to maintain friendship relations with crime-involved friends. However, having criminal friends implied certain risks and despite their efforts to stay out of crime, they sometimes unintentionally ended up in situations where they became indirectly involved with their friends’ criminal activities and hence the police.

Mixed up in drug dealing

Although none of our participants reported being exploitatively groomed or coerced into drug dealing by friends, some had however heard about others, who had ended up in such unfortunate situations. Nevertheless, for our participants, the mere hanging out with criminal friends involved a risk of being mixed up in their criminal activities, sometimes without even being able to anticipate it. Mehmet, for instance, was eager to complete his education without being involved in crime. Nevertheless, he felt a risk of involuntarily becoming part of his friends’ criminal work as drug runner (see Søgaard et al., 2019).

Mehmet:

Once when I was out driving with someone [friends] there was this bag [drugs] and then he [friend] had to deliver it. However, I didn’t want to be a downer by saying that I wanted to go home. So, you stand there and suddenly you’re part of it. (Male 18. Group interview, 2 participants)

Borrowing criminal friends’ cars could also involve a risk, as another participant explained:

Nadir:

Once, when I was driving the police searched my car and all that. They could smell something and by coincidence found a small bag with something green in it. It was only a small bag with 1.3 grams of green. It wasn’t mine. It was my friend’s. It was under a seat and I didn’t even know it was there. It wasn’t my car. (Male 27. Interview)

Especially, one risked being charged for friends’ crimes if one were part of a close friendship group based on loyalty. In an informal conversation with the interviewer, one participant described how he had borrowed a car from his friend. While driving, he was stopped by the police, who found a great amount of drugs in the car. Instead of informing the police that the drugs belonged to his friend, he intended to serve the prison sentence himself. In doing that, he stayed faithful to his friend and the implicit social codes in the friendship group saying that they trusted and protected each other.

Violence

One of the risks of hanging out with criminal friends was to become involved in violence and being caught in-between different moral responsibilities to friends, the victim and the police. In the following case, such a situation could affect their lives in the ‘decent’ sphere. Nasser attended the local high school. He was nervous as he feared being brought in for interrogation by the police because of a violent incident he had been involved in. This could affect his education and his participation in a forthcoming journey abroad with the school. He explained,

Yusuf:

(. . .) We are six. We see this guy, a Danish man with a coat, completely normal, who walks by. Then one of my friends asks him: ‘Do you have a smoke’. Then he [the man] says: ‘I don’t smoke’. Then when he walks by. . . he is hit in the back of his head. He is hit hard and falls to the ground (. . .). Then the one who hits him takes his watch, but I tell him: ‘Throw away the watch’. Then he throws the watch and I stop them from hitting the guy. We apologize to the man and want to go home and just end there. (. . .) That guy he really was hit and kicked badly. I really felt sorry for him. (Male 17. Interview)

This group of friends was then stopped by a police patrol and told that they would later be contacted by the police. To many young men, the most severe consequences of having criminal friends were to endure more police control and potentially become known by the police.

Confronted with the police

When hanging out and socializing with criminal friends, our participants risked attracting the attention of the police and consequently being labeled as ‘criminal’ or ‘gang affiliated’. Typically, police stops happened at the local shopping center, in streets, or at squares. Below Trine reflects on the unpleasantness of being stopped by the police, as well as expressing sadness that her friends had got accustomed to this.

Trine:

(. . .) it’s a shame that you can’t go out with your friends without getting a heart attack every time.

It sounds like something you have experienced often?

Trine:

Yes, I think I’ve been stopped three times this week.

(. . .)

What do they [friends] think of that?

Trine:

They find it uncomfortable, but they are used to it. That’s almost the worst; that they are used to being stopped. They almost have a relation to the officers because they’ve been stopped so many times. (Female 18. Group interview, 2 participants)

Concern was also expressed about being registered by the police as it could have serious implications if one became known by the police and became registered as a potential criminal.

Hassan, for instance, tells how he fears that he could be potentially registered or charged by the police when together with large groups of friends in public spheres if some of them happened to commit a crime. This fear was particularly pertinent if one became registered as ‘gang-affiliated’. Being observed in company with known gang members was sufficient to be registered by the police as ‘gang affiliated’. Moreover, committing a gang-related crime could result in more severe punishments. Therefore, our participants adopted a cautious approach to gang-related friends or acquaintances.

Wahid:

You will be criminal because you hang out with them [friends] and then the police come and register you. (. . .)

Muhammed:

Then they’ll know who you are. The issues with gangs has led to caution.

What does it mean that you’re cautious?

Muhammed:

Before I wasn’t cautious about who I said hi to. But I am now. If someone waves at me, I just look the other way. I don’t want to be registered [by the police]. (Male 19 and male 18. Focus group interview, 4 participants)

This anxiousness then, did not relate to being involved in criminal behavior or having criminal acquaintances, but instead was associated with becoming labeled by the authorities and the resulting consequences.

Yafar:

When the police is here, I don’t want to show that I have anything to do with these people [gang related friends]. And they [friends] understand that. (Male 19. Focus group interview, 4 participants)

Also for many of our participants, it was difficult to figure out precisely what constituted gang activity or gang membership in the eyes of the police. Many of our participants–criminal as well as not criminal–were affiliated in close friendship groups based on values that resembled typical gang values (closeness, strong loyalty, membership, name, etc.; see also Vigil and Long, 1990). Several participants described how they were part of a ‘brotherhood’. ‘It’s a brotherhood but the police say we are a gang’ (Male 17. Interview). Some of these ‘brotherhoods’ were engaged in criminality, whereas most were just close friendship groups with shared cultural values that offered help and safety to the individual. As one young man expressed it, ‘We are together all the time (. . .). It’s also something about showing people that we are loyal to each other. We are together’ (Male 17. Interview).

According to our participants, the police tended to classify such close ‘brotherhoods’ as gangs or gang-related groups, whereas for the young people it was a way of being young and practicing friendship in high-risk neighborhoods. Consequently, performing street culture in these neighborhoods could be interpreted as potential criminal or troublemaking behaviors thus resulting in intensified police control.

Discussion

Data from this study provide insight into how young people in a designated ‘high-risk’ neighborhood make use of different cognitive and microlevel tactics in their everyday lives to maintain close relationships with friends while trying to avoid becoming involved in criminal activities. By adopting this perspective, we hope to move beyond a line of desistance research focusing solely on peer pressure and risk factors involved in socializing with crime-involved peers. Balancing relationships with criminally involved peers was a constant everyday processual negotiation of friendship relations, moral obligations, and risk assessment. However, the young people were highly competent in shifting between ‘street’ and ‘decent’ scripts (Anderson, 1999) depending on whether they were with their friends or at work or school. We have shown how these tactics included everyday practices of identity work and role negotiation where they drew on cultural repertoires from different social spheres. Generally, the young people were very aware of how and in which situations they could relate to their criminally-involved friends to avoid the risks that could potentially arise.

In addition, we have shown that maintaining relations while abstaining from crime was a two-way process: Our participants took their precautions to dissociate themselves from the criminal parts of their friends’ lives and their friends were often considerate about not involving them in criminal activities. In that regard, the young people did not necessarily feel subjected to negative peer pressure. In fact, some managed to play a counseling role in order to influence their friends in positive ways. The risks of being close with criminal friends (being mixed up in drug trade, violence, registered by the police) were often described as an unpleasant unintended consequence of having crime-involved friends.

From their perspectives, the worst consequences of having crime-involved friends was not necessarily the possibility of becoming involved in drug dealing, violent incidents or similar activities, as they had tactics and the know-how on how to avoid the potential risks involved in this. Instead, the most dangerous consequence of having crime-involved friends was to endure more police control and potentially becoming classified and registered as gang-involved.

National government plans and policies have led to intensified policing initiatives to fight group related youth crime in Danish marginalized neighborhoods. These initiatives might force the young people to distance themselves from criminal friends and thus protect them from unknowingly being involved in criminal activities. However, in some ways, these initiatives are indirect ways of criminalizing the young people’s social relations and their performance of ‘street culture’. This mirrors Goffman’s (2014) description of how a criminal justice system can be deeply entangled in the social lives of criminalized young people in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Although our participants are not living ‘fugitive lives’ running from the authorities, as those in Goffman’s research in Philadelphia, there are nevertheless parallels between how the police and the criminal justice system structure social lives and relations between young people. Other research has highlighted the consequences of ‘moral policing’ where individuals are sanctioned by the police because they hang out with a particular group (Søgaard and Houborg, 2018). This leads to problems of regulatory transparency in that the ‘affiliations’ with a criminal community is a matter of interpretation and police discretion (Ibid.).

Over-policing and indirectly criminalizing young people in marginalized areas, might result in a situation where young men from ethnic minority backgrounds are even more likely to become targets for the police gaze and have to endure even more police control because they live and have friends in marginalized neighborhoods (Kammersgaard et al. 2021). Moreover, this might intensify their general lack of trust in the system and the police as well as their feelings of being disproportionately targeted, and in some cases discriminated against, by law enforcement authorities (Haller et al., 2020a; Wästerfors D and Alm VB (2020). In other words, criminalizing young people who are not involved in crime, might produce distrust and disrespect for the police among this generally law-abiding group (Aldridge et al., 2011). Furthermore, by labeling young people as ‘criminal’ from a young age, policing measures in deprived neighborhoods may ultimately end up sustaining and reproducing the problems that they are seeking to alleviate (McAra and McVie, 2005). In that regard, the widespread concerns about being stopped or ‘registered’ by the police expressed by the noncriminally involved young people in this study, including children under the age of 18 years, should be taken seriously and one could consider whether young people, and especially under the age of 18 years, should be entitled more protection from police stops than adults (Flacks, 2018).

As we have shown in this article, many young law-abiding people manage to maintain relations with crime-involved friends while abstaining from crime by drawing on a range of cultural repertoires. Instead of indirectly criminalizing them because of their social relations, a way of supporting their – and thus indirectly their friends’ – desistance from crime is to help them enlarge their repertoire of ‘decent’ scripts.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The project was funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

ORCID iD

Mie Birk Haller

Notes

Author biographies

Mie Birk Haller is PhD and social anthropologist. She currently teaches social work at Via University College, Aarhus. She has conducted qualitative research in many different contexts and her research focuses on marginalization, prisons, crime, drug and alcohol practices and ethnic minority youth perceptions of the police.

Thomas Friis Søgaard is PhD and Associate Professor at Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University. He is a qualitative researcher and his research interests include drug markets, drug policy, policing and the night-time economy. He has published widely on these issues, and edited a special issue on the onto-politics of cannabis.

Torsten Kolind is professor and Centre Director of Centre of Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University. He has published widely in the fields of criminal justice, prisons, ethnicity, young people, drug treatment, alcohol and drugs. He is EIC of Drug: Education, Prevention and Policy.

Mads Madsen is finishing his PhD ethnic minority populations relation to the police at the Centre for Drug and Alcohol Research, Aarhus University, while teaching criminology at VIA University College. From a background in ethnology and criminology, he studies interactions between community, police and welfare state institutions.

Geoffrey Hunt is a social anthropologist and is currently Professor at the Centre for Alcohol and Drugs Research at Aarhus University, and Senior Scientist at ISA in San Francisco. He is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) on an NIH funded project in the USA and also PI on two Danish Research Council projects.

Tobias Kammersgaard is a postdoctoral researcher at Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University. His research focuses on the policing of various marginalized groups and he is particularly interested in the ‘softer’ and less coercive aspects of policing, including community policing, police-led diversion and harm reduction policing.

References

Aldridge

Ralphs

Medina

(2011) Collateral damage: Territory and policing in an English gang city. In: Goldson

(ed.) Youth in Crisis? London: Routledge, 84–100.

Anderson

(1999) Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: W. W. Norton.

Ansel-Henry

Jespersen

(2003) Konflikt på gadeplan: Når etnisk minoritetsungdom og politi mødes. Roskilde: Center for Ungdomsforskning.

Back

(1996) New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives. London: Routledge.

Benoit

Randolph

Dunlap

Johnson

(2003) Code switching and inverse imitation among Marijuana-using crack sellers. British Journal of Criminology 43(3): 506–525.

Biernacki

Waldorf

(1981) Snowball sampling: Problems and techniques of chain referral sampling. Sociological Methods & Research 10(2): 141–163.

Carlsson

(2012) Using ‘turning points’ to understand processes of change in offending. British Journal of Criminology 52(1): 1–16.

Carlsson

(2018) Drifting out of crime: Criminal careers, maturational reform, and desistance. In: Cullen

Adler

Laufer

Blomberg

Carlsson

Jonson

(eds) Delinquency and Drift Revisited: The Criminology of David Matza and Beyond. New York: Routledge, 151–158.

Carvalho

Lewis

(2003) Beyond community: Reactions to crime and disorder among inner-city residents. Criminology 41(3): 779–812.

10.

Danish National Police (2019) National strategi for politiets indsats i de særligt udsatte boligområder. Copenhagen: Danish National Police.

11.

Finstad

(2000) Politiblikket. Oslo: Pax.

12.

Flacks

(2018) The stop and search of minors: A ‘vital police tool’? Criminology and Criminal Justice 18(3): 364–384.

13.

Freiesleben

(2016) Et Danmark af parallelsamfund: Segregering, ghettoisering og social sammenhængskraft: Parallelsamfundet i dansk diskurs 1968-2013 – fra utopi til dystopi. Det Humanistiske Fakultet: Københavns Universitet.

14.

Garot

(2009) Reconsidering retaliation: Structural inhibitions, emotive dissonance, and the acceptance of ambivalence among inner-city young men. Ethnography 10(1): 63–90.

15.

Garot

(2010) Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets. New York: New York University Press.

16.

Goffman

(2014) On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. London: University of Chicago Press.

17.

Government (2004) Regeringens strategi mod ghettoisering. Copenhagen: Ministry of immigration and integration.

18.

Government (2017a) Bander bag tremmer: 28 initiativer mod rocker- og bandekriminalitet. Copenhagen: Ministry of Justice.

19.

Government (2017b) Definitionen på en ghetto – De fem kriterier. Copenhagen: Ministry of Transport and Housing.

20.

Government (2018) Ét Danmark uden parallelsamfund – ingen ghettoer i 2030. Copenhagen: Ministry of economy and interior.

21.

Gunter

(2008) Growing up bad: Black youth, ‘road’ culture and badness in an East London neighbourhood. Crime, Media and Culture 4(3): 349–366.

22.

Hagedorn

(2008) A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

23.

Haller

Kolind

Hunt

Søgaard

(2020a) Experiencing police violence and insults: Narratives from ethnic minority men in Denmark. Nordic Journal of Criminology 21(2): 170–185.

24.

Haller

Solhjell

Saarikkomäki

Kolind

Hunt

Wästerfors

(2020b) Minor harassments: Ethnic minority youth in the Nordic countries and their perceptions of the police. Criminology and Criminal Justice 20(1): 3–20.

25.

Harding

(2009) Violence, older peers, and the socialization of adolescent boys in disadvantaged neighborhoods. The American Sociological Review 74(3): 445–464.

26.

Harding

(2010) Living the Drama: Community, Conflict, and Culture among Inner-city Boys. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

27.

Harding

(2020) County Lines. Exploitation and Drug Dealing among Urban Street Gangs. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

28.

Haynie

(2001) Delinquent peers revisited: Does network structure matter? American Journal of Sociology 106(4): 1013–1057.

29.

Herold

Søgaard

(2019) Disturbing the ‘spoiled unspoiled’ binary: Performances of recovering identities in drug-experienced youths’ friendship narratives. Addiction Research and Theory 27(3): 226–234.

30.

Holmberg

(2003) Policing Stereotypes: A Qualitative Study of Police Work in Denmark. Berlin: Galda und Wilch Verlag.

31.

Holmberg

Kyvsgaard

(2003) Are immigrants and their descendants discriminated against in the Danish criminal justice system? Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention 4(2): 125–142.

32.

Katz

(1988) Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil. New York: Basic Books.

33.

Kammersgaard

Søgaard

Haller

Kolind

Hunt

(2021) Community policing in Danish “ghetto” areas: Trust and distrust between the police and ethnic minority youth. Criminology and Criminal Justice. [Online] https://doi.org/10.1177/17488958211017390

34.

Kolind

Thomas

Hunt

Thylstrup

(2017) Transitional narratives of identity among ethnic minority youth gangs in Denmark: from collectivism to individualism. Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention 18(1): 3–19.

35.

Lalander

(2016) Illegal street economies and drugs: Getting involved, skilled and trying to quit. In: Thom

Hunt

Kolind

(eds) The Sage Handbook of Drug and Alcohol Studies: Social Science Approaches. London: Sage, 642–658.

36.

Laub

Sampson

(2006) Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

37.

Lindegaard

Zimmermann

(2017) Flexible cultural repertoires: Young men avoiding offending and victimization in township areas of Cape Town. Ethnography 18(2): 193–220.

38.

Lonardo

Giordano

Longmore

Manning

(2009) Parents, friends, and romantic partners: Enmeshment in deviant networks and adolescent delinquency involvement. Journal of Youth and Adolescence 38(3): 367–383.

39.

McAra

McVie

(2005) The usual suspects? Street-life, young people and the police. Criminal Justice 5(1): 5–36.

40.

McLean

Robinson

Densley

(2019) County Lines. Criminal Networks and Evolving Drug Models in Britain. Cham: Springer.

41.

Maruna

(2001) Making Good: How Ex-convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

42.

Matza

(1964) Delinquency and Drift. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

43.

Moyle

(2019) Situating vulnerability and exploitation in street-level drug markets: Cuckooing, commuting and the ‘county lines’ drug supply model. Journal of Drug Issues 49(4): 739–755.

44.

Mullin

(2006) Holding Your Square: Masculinities, Streetlife and Violence. Cullompton: Willan.

45.

Nielsen

Jensen

Klement

Vitus

(2019) Kriminalitet og etniske minoriteter: Opsamling. Copenhagen: Det Kriminalpræventive Råd.

46.

Pyrooz

Turanovic

Decker

(2016) Taking stock of the relationship between gang membership and offending. Criminal Justice and Behavior 43(3): 365–397.

47.

Saarikkomäki

Haller

Solhjell

Alvesalo

Kolind

Hunt

Burcar

(2021) Suspected or protected? Perceptions of procedural justice in ethnic minority youth’s descriptions of police relations. Policing and Society 314(4): 1–16.

48.

Sandberg

Pedersen

(2011) Street Capital: Black Cannabis Dealers in a White Welfare State. Bristol: The Policy Press.

49.

Solhjell

Saarikkomäki

Haller

Wästerfors

Xxx

(2019) ‘We are seen as a threat’: Police stops of young ethnic minorities in the Nordic countries. Critical Criminology 27(2): 347–361.

50.

Søgaard

Houborg

(2018) Plural policing webs: Unveiling the various forms of partnering and knowledge exchange in the production of nightlife territoriality. In: Nicholas

Gundhus

Rønn

(eds) Moral Issues in Intelligence-led Policing. London: Routledge, pp. 185–203.

51.

Søgaard

Kolind

Haller

Hunt

(2019) Ring and bring drug services: Delivery dealing and the social life of a drug phone. International Journal of Drug Policy 69: 8–15.

52.

Søgaard

Bræmer

Pedersen

(2021) Exploring Drug Supply, violence and exploitation of vulnerable groups in Denmark. Lisbon. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

53.

Vigil

Long

(1990) Emic and etic perspectives on gang culture. In: Huff

(eds) Gangs in America 1990. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 55–68.

54.

Walters

(2020) Positive parents and negative peers: Assessing the nature and order of caregiver and friend effects in predicting early delinquency. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 18(1): 96–114.

55.

Warr

Stafford

(1991) The influence of delinquent peers: What they think or what they do. Criminology 29(4): 851–865.

56.

Wästerfors

Alm

(2020) ‘They are harsher to me than to my friend who is blonde’: Police critique among ethnic minority youth in Sweden. Journal of Youth Studies 2(2): 170–188.

57.

Weaver

(2012) The relational context of desistance: Some implications and opportunities for social policy. Social Policy and Administration 46(4): 395–412.

58.

Weaver

(2013) Desistance, reflexivity and relationality: A case study. European Journal of Probation 5(3): 71–88.