Policing Migration, Protest, and Sovereignty: The Politicisation of Stop and Search Practices in Spain

Stop and search measures, and policing practices more generally, have rarely made their way into public and political conversations in Spain. However, three phenomena placed policing strategies in the political arena, raising genuine public controversies. Initially, some non-state actors successfully challenged political guidelines targeting potential irregular migrants for intensive stop and search interventions in the late 2000s. The leak of internal documents detailing these police practices and the action of local networks of activists resulted in regulatory changes banning racial profiling in 2012. Subsequently, a broad range of grassroots organisations raised public awareness over the widespread use of stop and search interventions as a low-profile tool to curb increasing political protests in the early to mid-2010s. In 2015, new public order legislation was enacted to expand police powers. Finally, the heavy-handed strategies used by the Spanish administration to counter Catalan dissent since the mid-2010s have paved the way for the widespread politicisation of a variety of policing practices, stop and search measures among them. This paper scrutinises these three events of politicisation of policing interventions, considering the political scenarios, narratives, and actors, as well as the strengths and shortcomings of political campaigns challenging police powers.