Paul Mutsaers (born 1984) is a researcher in the Department of Culture Studies at the Tilburg School of Humanities and at the Police Academy of the Netherlands. In recent years he conducted an anthropological study of Dutch police behavior towards immigrants.
Employed by the Police Academy of the Netherlands, between 2008 and 2013 he joined numerous street patrols and had hundreds of conversations with officers from various ethnic backgrounds about their experiences within the force and about police work in superdiverse communities throughout the country.
In his thesis, entitled “A Public Anthropology of Policing: Law Enforcement and Migrants in the Netherlands”, he describes both internal and external discrimination: against fellow officers as well as against members of the public. For example, he found that homeless immigrants –legal and illegal – are relatively often victims of police discrimination.
