Exploring police officers’ narratives about racism in Portugal

Abstract

This article examines how police officers in Portugal narrate racism in relation to policing practices, victim descriptions, police databases, and Big Data technologies. Drawing on 34 interviews with members of the Public Security Police (PSP) and the Judiciary Police (PJ), the analysis identifies three interconnected empirical themes: the concentration of policing resources in racialised neighbourhoods; the use of racial identifiers in victim descriptions; and the perceived neutrality of police databases and algorithmic systems. The article argues that officers’ narratives may contribute to the reproduction of institutional racism by presenting racialised outcomes as spatially necessary, procedurally neutral, or technologically objective. Critical Race Theory provides the overarching framework for examining how racial power may be reproduced through formally neutral practices, while policing studies situate these processes within professional cultures and institutional routines. Durrheim et al.’s framework is used as a secondary interpretative resource to identify how racism is split, displaced, de-racialised, relativised, or trivialised. The findings show how apparently minor and disconnected practices may interact to reinforce racial disproportionality while preserving an institutional self-image of impartiality. By bringing CRT into dialogue with policing studies and critical research on technology, the article contributes to understanding the subtle mechanisms through which institutional racism may be reproduced in Portuguese and European policing contexts.