IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/crimin/v64y2024i2p292-307..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Relational Police Work: How Police Officers Work With, On and Through ‘Personal Relationships’ in a Danish Gang Exit Programme

Author

Listed:
  • Mette-Louise E Johansen

Abstract

This article examines how police-assisted gang desistance in Denmark is run on the backdrop of a particular kind of ‘relational work’ that focuses on relationships as the basis for change. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2020 with police officers, social workers and gang defectors attached to the city of Aarhus Exit Unit, part of Denmark’s national gang exit programme. The Exit Unit’s relational work consisted of creating close, personal relationships with defectors, which could serve as a vehicle for interventions into the defectors’ relationships with gangs, family, friends and neighbourhoods. This relational work was highly ambiguous; it entailed dual practices of correctional control and help to reposition defectors in-between criminal and non-criminal social worlds.

Suggested Citation

  • Mette-Louise E Johansen, 2024. "Relational Police Work: How Police Officers Work With, On and Through ‘Personal Relationships’ in a Danish Gang Exit Programme," The British Journal of Criminology, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, vol. 64(2), pages 292-307.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:crimin:v:64:y:2024:i:2:p:292-307.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/bjc/azad025
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:crimin:v:64:y:2024:i:2:p:292-307.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/bjc .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.