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British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on July 17, 2008
British Journal of Criminology 2008 48(5):620-640; doi:10.1093/bjc/azn048
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The British Journal of Criminology 48:620-640 (2008)
© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Chivalry, ‘Race’ and Discretion at the Canadian Border

Anna Pratt* and Sara K. Thompson**

* Associate Professor, Criminology Program, Division of Social Science, York University, Toronto, Canada; apratt{at}yorku.ca.

** Assistant Professor, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.


  Abstract

A thorough-going ambiguity surrounds the very meaning of racial profiling at the border. This ambiguity, including in particular the slippage between race/nationality, effectively enables both official denials of racial profiling as well as the continued play of racialized risk knowledges at the border. In this paper, we take this ambiguity seriously and trace the dynamic and heterogeneous configurations of racialized knowledges that constitute border risks and that shape the broad discretion of frontline border control officers in Canada. This discretion, emboldened by the crime–security nexus, is itself shaped by a protectionist logic that represents the nation as ‘damsel in distress’, border officers as her guardians and the border as the thin blue line in need of constant vigilance.


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