Abstract

Law enforcement’s troubled interactions (characterised by unusually harsh, arbitrary, unjust, and racist interactions and attitudes) with minority and marginalised populations in Canada and other western countries are well documented. Against the backdrop of such scholarship, this paper attempts to make sense of alternative perceptions held by some sex workers of colour about police officers’ attitudes or behaviours towards minority and marginalised communities. Using qualitative interview data, this paper explains how some sex workers of colour in Canada actively interpret the character of law and legality to negotiate power imbalances when interacting with police officers. The main aim here is to show how research participants produce a counter-narrative and a polarised image (instead of a fixed one) of police officers as simultaneously ‘compassionate’ and ‘prejudiced’ social control agents, bringing out the symbiotic tensions between such dichotomous characteristics.