Tingbjerg Shooting
Whenever the police use lethal or potentially lethal force against a racialised person, the public conversation tends to follow a familiar script. Long before the facts are established, before the circumstances are examined, and before any “independent investigation” reaches its conclusions, a process of narrative creation is already underway. Attention shifts away from the actions of the cops and towards the person who was shot or in the case of the shooting of the young man in Tingbjerg, toward the neighbourhood itself.
The discussion quickly ceased to revolve around the police shooting and instead was absorbed into a pre-existing narrative in which Tingbjerg appears not as a place inhabited by ordinary people but as a permanently suspect territory requiring exceptional policing and political intervention. A quick look at the mainstream media, the days following the cop shooting, reveals few mentions of the shooting and endless lines on the minor “riots” that followed, the alleged criminality of local youth, and the supposed dysfunction of the community. So, rather than asking whether the cop’s use of force was justified —which in our opinion it never is— public debate asked what kind of neighbourhood produces such reactions.
This reversal is not accidental but is rather a narrative manipulation and a broader mechanism through which state violence acquires legitimacy. It is not enough for force to be exercised; it must be embedded within a moral framework that renders it understandable, necessary, or even inevitable. Therefore, responsibility is deflected from the institutions that have such coercive power onto those who experience it, or even onto an entire community.
For those not aware, Tingbjerg, among other administratively ghettoized areas, has for years occupied a particular place within the Danish political imagination. Built in the 1960s as part of the welfare state’s public housing programme, Tingbjerg was originally envisioned as a self-sufficient working-class community. Yet, as its demographic composition changed it became increasingly racialised in political discourse, culminating in its designation as a “ghetto” in 2010—a classification that followed decades of moral panic over so-called “immigrantghettoer”. Through the state’s “ghetto law”, the area has been subjected to exceptional legal measures, redevelopment schemes, policing strategies and intensified surveillance, justified by the claim that it represents a failure of integration instead of decades of socio-economic marginalisation. It has even been an experimental area for redevelopment and integration plans with the insertion of white hip liberal danish couples. There is even a hilarious documentary about it (Tingbjerg Experiment).
The timing of the incident is especially significant. It coincides with a renewed national debate over neighbourhoods in which people of Danish origin constitute a numerical minority. Following new figures published by Statistics Denmark, leading government parties described these demographic changes as a threat to social cohesion. Representatives of both the Moderates and the Social Democrats argued that integration depends upon preventing concentrations of migrant communities, while the Social Democrats warned that “when too many people come here, it threatens Danish culture and we risk our country breaking apart”. The Danish People’s Party has made this logic explicit. Martin Henriksen and Morten Messerschmidt’s renewed promition of a remigration agenda no longer frames migrants and their descendants as people to be integrated, but as populations whose continued presence are itself a political problem. Within such a framework, racialised neighbourhoods are not allowed to appear as communities deserving public investment and democratic accountability; they become territories to be managed until they can, implicitly or explicitly, be transformed through exclusion. Such statements do not just express disillusioned economic concerns about immigration but rather they normalize a political vocabulary in which racialised communities become associated with social disorder, cultural incompatibility, and national decline.
The cop shooting therefore cannot be understood in isolation from the political context in which it occurred. It unfolded within a political environment that has systematically racialised certain neighbourhoods and their residents, constructing them as populations to be managed rather than citizens entitled to a free life. This is how institutional racism operates: through the cumulative effects of laws, administrative categories, policing practices, political rhetoric and media representations that repeatedly define certain populations as exceptional, problematic, and potentially threatening. Under this framework, police violence appears less as an extraordinary event demanding accountability than as an expected feature of governing populations that have already been positioned outside the imagined boundaries of the national community.
Discourses around the unrest and “riots” in areas like Tingbjerg quickly slip into a cultural racism in which Muslim communities are construed as having an innate tendency toward violence or hostility toward authority — as in cases of stone-throwing targeting police vans in Vollsmose, framed as aggressive, counter-democratic, and backward — while police action is treated as necessary and rational. Once again, it is the residents’ supposed innate tendency toward violence that gets debated in the media, rather than the question of police aggression.
This is precisely what makes every police shooting a political event, regardless of its legal assessment. It concerns far more than the individual who was shot and the cop who pulled the trigger. It concerns the relationship between all citizens and state power. Each time the boundaries of acceptable police violence are expanded, the very meaning of our social fabric is quietly transformed. The state of exception moves a little closer to becoming the rule.
History shows that these shifts never occur abruptly. Instead, they advance gradually through subtle changes in what society is willing to tolerate. One incident is dismissed as an “isolated case”, the next becomes an “exceptional circumstance”, another is justified as a “necessary intervention”. Over time, what would only a decade earlier have provoked the democratic reflexes of the public comes to be treated as just another item in the daily news cycle.
We accuse the state and its armed arm for their murderous intent.
We accuse the mainstream media of manufacturing consent for this murderous act.
We stand in solidarity with the racialized communities and with people subjected to state violence.
