Criminalizing Style: Aesthetic Injustice and Racial Profiling in Sweden

This contribution extends the understanding of the punitive turn that Swedish politics on crime and punishment is taking by exploring the discursive impact of the visitation zone reform, a measure that allows the police to lower their discretionary standards during certain times in designated areas to ‘risk profile’. Based on ten focus group interviews with 51 participants from a racialized working-class area, the analytical focus is on the relationship among risk profiling, racial profiling and the role of clothing. In the article, scholarship on racism is brought together with debates on policing and aesthetic injustice for the enforcement of social order. The visitation zone reform is deciphered as a race-making technique that guides the police gaze based on a racializing place and class-based imaginary of crime. According to residents, through the measure police officers are encouraged to target people who dress in a ‘hood way’. A main argument is that by criminalizing a certain style, identity-formation processes are repressed among racialized youth.