Yet the police, as manager of detention, have remained the indispensable and pivotal actor around which all other entities revolve.79 Though, this may not have been a problem per se, the institutional characteristics of the police and its close affinities to the state as protectors of state sovereignty under threat, and the far-right in the country, have made the police’s central role in detention problematic. Yet, this was not necessarily a role the police wanted to assume. As they have often argued ‘they were left all alone to do the dirty work’ without the necessary prerequisites and preparation (Christopoulos, 2014, p. 34). 80 And a dirty work they did. This section will not go through the wrongdoings of the police inside immigration detention, because these have been described in detail in the previous chapters. It will rather explain how the culture of violence has been made possible. To do so, I draw on the growing body of work, from around the world on immigration detention staff. Some of these approaches are familiar as they owe much to similar scholarship on prisons, which has explored the relationship between legitimacy and discretion in prison officer work (see, for example, Liebling, 2000; Crewe, 2011). Luigi Gariglio’s ethnography of Italian prison officers is illuminating the lawful, yet problematic and discretionary use of force in confinement institutions. Alexandra Hall (2010; 2012) focused on staff, and how they governed immigration detainees. In her ethnographic account, Hall explores how social life in UK immigration detention centres is characterised by ‘antagonism and tensions between the detainees and officers, but could also produce encounters of respect, generosity or solicitude.’ (Hall, 2012, p. 19). Other work on staff in the UK explores issues of race and gender (Bosworth and Slade, 2014; Bosworth, 2018; 2019a), setting out the ways in which such factors not only help officers ‘make sense’ of detainees, but structure all their encounters. Further north, in the Nordic countries too, scholarship has examined officer behavior. There, accounts primarily explore the affective nature on the job, albeit from quite different perspectives depending, in part, on the disciplinary bent of the author (Puthoopparambil et al, 2015; Ugelvik, 2016). For Puthoopparambil and colleagues in Sweden, for instance, working within psychology, the emphasis is on the emotional labour of this job (Puthoopparambil et al, 2015). Canning (2020) too, albeit from a more critical As was mentioned in previous chapters, until 2013, the police were responsible for the asylum procedure too. 80 Rozakou (2017a) explains that police officers have expressed similar concerns during the summer of 2015, i.e., that they were abandoned by the state to perform their duties. 79 127