Relations between the police and ethnic minorities in Sheffield, England

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify how police officers and minority groups experience and describe their relations by attempting to pinpoint the importance and place of identity and ethnicity in structuring these relations. This research has been conducted in an area of Sheffield in U.K. from 1994 to 1995. Twenty interviews with police officers and twenty-three interviews with members of different ethnicized groups have been realized. The results of this study suggest that the viewpoints of the police officers are far less uniform than those of the minority group respondents. The four main areas where the police and minority groups differ in their viewpoints are their views on changes in relations between the two groups, their description of these relations, their definition of ethnicity and their views on the policy of minority police recruitment.