The “gypsy Threat”: Modes of Racialization and Visual Representation Underlying German Police Practices

This chapter analyses German police press releases and other media coverage and shows that, to date, German police authorities continue to exercise biased and racialized approaches to Sinti, Roma, and other peoples whom they perceive to be “gypsy-like”. These approaches are based on the narrative of a “gypsy threat” that results in practices of securitizing those perceived as “gypsies”. Common practices include the continued collection of “ethnic” data as well as warnings to the general population of an alleged threat of “gypsy crime”. The chapter argues that this narrative is interwoven with a specific visual police regime of the “criminal gypsy” as a sub-regime of the more general visual regime of “the gypsy”, further supporting practices of racial profiling and social exclusion.