My team implored the NGO director to act on the information we were collecting every day and to make a formal complaint against the policies and processes that made ordinary things, like a clean toilet, adequate food, dignity, or asylum such a distant dream for all these people. Yet each time we were discouraged from pursuing further action, because this would, allegedly, disrupt our relations with the police and would affect our daily routines (Fili, 2013). After a series of incidents, where the police expressed unease about our interference with the detainees’ files,111 we were further forbidden, via email, to go directly to the police authorities to confront them or even to ask about the detainees’ case. All our queries had to be sent to one of our senior colleagues, who had established rapport with the police. In other words, we were considered a liability in the working relationship the NGO had established with the police. The NGO director was right. The complaint letter we addressed to relevant ministries and the media, created outrage in the police force at the airport centre (Newsit, 2012). Detention officers compromised our access to detainees. Officials at the centre threatened to file lawsuits against us for slander. Others were hurt because they trusted us and thought we had betrayed them. Yet in the long run, the managing authorities grew more receptive to our recommendations, or at least appeared to do so by allowing for more ‘freedoms’ (e.g., cutlery, more cigarettes, more visits to the toilet). Our success was celebrated but soon forgotten as the situation gradually went back to ‘normal’; namely, cruel, unjust practices and inhuman conditions. As a former NGO worker noted ‘We were in the police premises but didn’t work for the police. We had to cooperate. You can’t be denouncing because that would have repercussions the next day, repercussions for the detainees themselves, but for yourself too…We were afraid of the consequences. And it is not just my feeling. We all felt this way, that we had to be diplomatic and not challenge them [the police].’ (Interview, Athens, 2018). The centrality of fear, not simply as the threat of harm but also as a mechanism through which the behaviour of non-state actors was controlled, ‘contributed to managing and structuring dissent, channeling this into organizational structures and processes that do not threaten underlying power relations.’ (Choudry and Kapoor, 2013, p. 5; see also Gill and Burrow, 2018). As Seigel (2018) argues, the potential violence, that which we don’t see is the essence of police power. ‘It often need not be made manifest, because people This included giving information to those detained about their right to ask for asylum and complaining about ill-treatment. 111 163