Racial Profiling of Moroccan Youths: A case study of police interactions with minority youngsters

Criminal injustice prevails for ethnic minorities. In the Netherlands, Dutch-Moroccan youngsters are a minority overrepresented in the criminal system. From the French researcher Didier Fassin, assumptions about the differences in interactions between youth and the police in the French banlieues were posited, based on many years of research, for example that youngsters with working-class or non-European background are more frequently and in a different manner approached than the majority of youth. Using Fassins interaction theory, this paper analyzes the extent to which Dutch-Moroccan youngsters are treated unequally by the police due to their ethnic background compared to other youngsters. Underlying questions refer to how the interactions between the police and the youngsters take place and how the youngster ́s perception of the situation is interpreted. The relevance of this research lies within the selectivity of fundamental rights such as equal treatment, that is ongoing for groups like young Dutch-Moroccans and examine the extent to which racial profiling is structural and affects these youngsters more frequently than others.