The relationships between the police and young people have been the focus of much police scholarship in the past decades. Research suggests that they are often characterized by low levels of trust and high levels of conflict. Why this is so and what influences the quality of police-youth relationships has so far mostly been studied through the perspectives of the young people. By means of fieldwork in a crime prevention unit in Oslo, Norway, this article contributes to the scarce literature on how the police approach these relations and what is taking place in the encounters. Using interactional data, the present article addresses four interactional styles that police officers adopt in their work with young people: relational, distant, emotional and paternalistic. While this study indicates that the relational style’s characteristics seem to be ideal for building and maintaining police-youth relations, it also shows how other styles have their own advantages and challenges. Finally, the article concludes that taking officers’ interactional styles into account may provide insights into the dynamics and quality of police-youth relations.

As the debate on how to improve the police-community relationship continues, frequent and often hostile policing remains an inescapable part of life for many Black Britons. This article analyses the historical and contemporary policing experiences of Black communities in a north London suburb. Using data from 58 ethnographic semi-structured and unstructured qualitative interviews with young people, adults/elders and community workers, it explores the lived experience of generations of Black British communities labelled “suspect communities”. Despite police efforts to improve trust and confidence in Black communities, frequent and often hostile policing remains an inescapable part of life for many Black Britons. Negative experiences of policing over time are found to have created deeply embedded cultural narratives about how the police treat Black people that are transmitted across generations. These narratives provide conceptual frameworks to interpret information about the police which may be more powerful than other sources. The data illustrates that negative community perceptions of the police are the inevitable result of decades of racialized policing in Britain. This has significant implications for the present and future relationship between the police and Black Britons, representative of the place of Black Britons in the British state.

Body-worn videos (BWVs) were introduced to provide greater transparency and accountability over street-level policing encounters. The low-visibility nature of stop and search has prevented officers from being held to account for the disproportionate and discriminatory exercise of police stops. This has had a detrimental impact upon public confidence and public perceptions of police legitimacy, particularly amongst ethnic minority communities. Community stop and search scrutiny panels seek to not only hold officers accountable for the misuse of their powers, but can also aid forces to understand the impact of their powers upon communities through broader assessments of fairness and proportionality. This article examines the introduction of BWVs to scrutiny panels in England and Wales. It evaluates the extent to which BWVs provide greater transparency over stop and search and questions whether this necessarily results in greater accountability? It argues that BWVs provide less transparency over why the search was conducted and greater transparency over how the search was conducted, leading to a prioritization of procedural justice assessments over legality. Barriers to accountability are also discussed alongside recommendations for improving the effectiveness of scrutiny panels via increased training, structure and governance.