Commentary SAGE Publications New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London Greece: policing racist violence in the ‘fenceless vineyard’ By Georgios A. Antonopoulos Abstract: Drawing on interviews with Greek detectives carried out by the author in 2002, the Greek police’s attitudes towards migrant communities and racist violence are surveyed. Not only are migrant communities, particularly the Albanian, viewed as hotbeds of crime but racist violence against these communities is not viewed as a significant problem by the Greek police, who are usually indifferent to racially motivated crimes and often view racist incidents as acts of self-defence by Greeks against the criminal ‘other’. A transformation of such attitudes would require a public recognition of the widespread racism that exists in Greek society. Keywords: Albanian migrants, criminality, immigration, stereotyping, victimisation Since the transformation of Greece at the beginning of the 1990s into a country where immigration outstrips emigration, there has been a heated debate among politicians, academics, the public and the media, on the phenomenon of migration in Greece, which, in turn, has influenced the perceptions, opinions and actions of individuals, institutions and the state. The notions of ethnicity and migration have come to be intertwined with several other social issues and migration has been Race & Class Copyright & 2006 Institute of Race Relations Vol. 48(2): 92–100 10.1177/0306396806069526 http://rac.sagepub.com Downloaded from http://rac.sagepub.com at Athens Univ. of Economics on June 25, 2007 © 2006 Institute of Race Relations. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.