Colin Webster

Police Perception of Migration and Migrants in Greece

The beginning of the 1990s saw a sharp rise in the number of immigrants entering Greece from a variety of contexts. Drawing on notions of ethnicity and immigration, the phenomenon of migration into Greece became a topic of heated debate, and was increasingly identified with a range of “social problems” such as unemployment, national (in)security and, of course, crime. Events such as 9/11 in the US, 7/7 in Britain, and the 2005 riots in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities, although occurring in other contexts, had a global resonance and heightened these debates. The relationship between migrants and crime in particular has been an important issue in the social and political agenda of Greece with some intermissions. “Organised crime” in the country, for example, had been considered to be unknown before the beginning of the 1990s; nowadays the dominant view among social and political commentators, as well as Greek citizens in general, is that it has evolved in parallel with increasing levels of migration. Simultaneously, according to official figures, migrant groups make a significant contribution to official crime rates across a range of offences.

Turning the Tables? Media Constructions of British Asians from Victims to Criminals, 1962–2011

This chapter describes and analyses the processes and mechanisms of media-induced campaigns that construct the issues of ‘race’ and immigration as public or social ‘problems’ and ‘threats’ to order. Focusing on a succession of periods marked by distinctive themes connoting race and immigration, we see a dominant media discourse build the presence of visible minorities in British society as constituting ‘problems’ and ‘threats. Although directed at racialized visible minority groups generally, the chapter shows the particular role that British Asians come to play in a transformative drama in which they are at first seen as benign and even victims of injustice, then as coming to represent the greatest threat of all, towards the end of our periods.

Restoring the Crime-Poverty-Class Inequality Link

In a deservedly popular book about why people commit crime, Gash (Criminal: The truth about why people do bad things, Milton Keynes: Allen Lane, 2016) argues that the notion that poverty is the real cause of crime is a widely held myth. In his view, the supposed relationship between crime and poverty is held to be spurious because crime rates are said to have dramatically declined whilst poverty and inequality has soared. In contrast, the chapter argues that we need to go beyond narrow income poverty and financial need as sole motivators of criminality to understand that it is prolonged and intensive poverty experiences that expose sufferers to long-term forms of chronic anxiety, insecurity and an inability to influence things when and if they go wrong. It is these longer-term psychosocial effects that greatly increase the exposure of individuals to a series of risks making delinquency and criminal victimization more likely.

Deadly injustice: Trayvon Martin, race, and the criminal justice system

The acquittal of George Zimmerman – a twenty-eight-year-old Mixed Hispanic man and neighbourhood watch volunteer – for the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin – a seventeen-year-old unarmed African-Am...

Invisible men: mass incarceration and the myth of black progress

by far the best on the subject of race and colour in contemporary Mexico. The author is able to capture her subjects’ attitudes on topics which most Mexicans prefer not to discuss openly. Her study has all the hallmarks of a first-rate ethnography: rich detail, keen observations and important theoretical contributions. It will undoubtedly become necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding how race is actually lived in Latin America today.