Suspicion appears to sit largely in the nose: we might say that something ‘stinks,’ ‘smells off,’ that we ‘smell a rat,’ or perhaps ‘something fishy.’ Such suspicious smells may, in turn, compel us to ‘sniff out trouble’—at least until we ‘lose the scent.’
While these metaphors can seem curious or quirky at first sight, they do map onto two domains of meaning directly related to suspicion: universal perceptions of danger (decay or spoiled food) and images of searching and tracking (a dog on a trail). The association between the sense of smell and suspicion is further reflected in the olfactory system’s function as a bodily warning system triggered by smoke, bad food, leaking gas, and so on (Ramšak 2024).
It is from this general metaphorical terrain of olfactory suspicion that I take my cue. Based on fieldwork with Danish police officers, I reflect on what is colloquially known as the police nose (“politinæse”)—a ubiquitous term in Danish police lingo that refers to officers’ ostensible unique ability to “catch a whiff” of something suspicious on their beats.
I suggest that while the police nose can be understood as a particular kind of ‘craft’ rooted in accumulated sensory experience, it also connects to wider public and scholarly debates regarding the dilemmas of the police’s discretionary powers. To anchor these thoughts,I begin with a brief ethnographic trip to Hill Park, a marginalized housing project in the suburbs of Copenhagen, to take a closer look at one specific police nose in practice.
‘The Nose’ In Action
In the early spring of 2024, I joined Detective Jensen, a calm and friendly man in his early forties, on a routine patrol around the estate. Around 10 am, the skies on the fringes of the city were as grey as the concrete blocks themselves. The estate, which is home to roughly 5,000 residents, most of whom come from immigrant and/or working-class backgrounds, had not quite awoken from its winter slumber yet.
As we rolled slowly past a kindergarten, Jensen smoothly brought the patrol car to a halt. “What’s that over there?” he said, narrowing his eyes. He had spotted an inconspicuous, grey car parked partly out of sight behind a shrubbery. “It’s just, you know, why is it parked there?” he asked, staring firmly in the direction of the vehicle. He motioned for me to follow him as he opened the door, got out, and walked toward the grey car. When I caught up, he explained: “After a while, you develop a police nose, you know, a kind of sixth sense. When you’ve pulled over so many cars or seen them parked in funny places, it triggers your attention. Why is it parked here? Has it been deliberately hidden? Has it been stolen? What’s up with it?” “Have you seen that car before?” I asked. “No,” Jensen said, walking around the car and reaching for a door handle to check if it had been left unlocked. “I haven’t seen it before, and we know the area well. So, I’m just having a look around now, you know—checking what’s on the ground, what’s on the floor, is it unlocked, does it have something to do with some of the familiar kids from the estate, yes, no…”
Jensen reached for his phone to scan the car’s license plate. “I’m just checking who owns the car,” he explained. “And then I’ll check what we know about that person. It’s 10 o’clock now, right? Is it someone who lives in the area, or someone who comes from the outside? That’s the sort of thing I want to know. Right now, things look peaceful enough, sure. But we always take a look around.”
He took another inspection round and then got down on one knee to have a look underneath the car. “What do we have here? Is that an unpaid parking ticket? And this right here definitely looks like a mixing tray of some kind,” he said in a slightly triumphant tone. Pointing to the shrubbery surrounding the car, he said, “If it had been dark out, this place would have been completely out of sight, right?”
The ‘Police Nose’ as Embodied Skill
Jensen’s discovery of drug paraphernalia in Hill Park was itself an unspectacular event, yet his explanation of the process behind it—that he had followed his police nose—opens an ethnographic window onto the importance of sensory inference and the ability to detect subtle environmental cues in everyday policing.
Indeed, the notion of the ‘police nose’ is no idiosyncrasy of Jensen’s, but a familiar phenomenon among Danish police officers that has also been noted by other ethnographers (e.g. Sausdal 2018). Police representatives themselves also assert that “everyone in the Danish police knows what the police nose is.” In the British context, a direct parallel exists in the form of the copper’s nose, which refers to officers’ allegedly unique ability “to sense when something doesn’t feel right” (Quin 2025, 11–12). Related sensory idioms of police officers acting on gut feelings or a ‘sixth sense’ (a term that Jensen also used) abound across the world.
Now, because of its vague and arguably somewhat self-elevating character, one could be tempted to dismiss talk of a unique ‘police nose’ as mere occupational folklore and mystique. I suggest, however, that it also points to a rather less arcane skill; namely, a developed capacity for decoding environments in a distinctly ‘police-like’ way. As Jensen put it, the police nose materialises once “you’ve pulled over so many cars, or seen them parked in funny places”—an observation that also implicitly invokes the well-known ability of smells to awaken past experiences(Ramšak 2024). And certainly, to an outside observer such as myself, the car parked in Hill Park would, if registered at all, probably index “someone left their car here.” But to Detective Jensen, it also indexed the possibility that “someone tried to hide their vehicle—let’s investigate.”
From this perspective, the idea of the police nose (like its various cognates) invokes what Tim Ingold has referred to as a process of enskilment, which denotes the gradual and practical “embodiment of capacities of awareness and response by environmentally situated agents” (2002, 5). Not at all unlike the Arctic hunters that originally inspired Ingold’s concept—hunters whose “perceptual system […] is attuned to picking up information, critical to the practical conduct of [their] hunting, to which the unskilled observer simply fails to attend” (Ingold 2002, 55)—Jensen and his colleagues gradually learn to sense subtle cues in their surroundings that may, or may not, refer to something of police interest. The police nose, from this perspective, could be understood not as a mysterious ability magically conferred by the badge or uniform, but as an occupational shorthand for an ‘enskilled’semiotic process of quickly scanning the environment for signs.
Pride and Prejudice?
The police nose, however, is more than just a skill; it is also a source of professional pride and identity. As Jensen’s remarks on its development also seemed to suggest, ‘having a nose’ for detecting trouble is closely tied to understandings of what it means to be a good officer. From this perspective, the semantic link between ‘smelling’ and ‘suspicion’ speaks not only to a generalized imagery of danger and detection, but also to a vocational ideology among police officers that values intuition, fine-tuned senses, and personal experience. Yet, the reading and interpretation of signs and cues in one’s surroundings—arguably the key ‘task’ of the police nose—is never a neutral endeavour but is always-already embedded in social-political contexts (Eco 1979). To illustrate this, let us briefly return to Hill Park and the car half-concealed by a shrubbery.
As Jensen finished his inspection of the vehicle and its surroundings, we got back into the police car, and he continued his reflections: “It’s broad daylight now, of course. And early in the morning. So, the person in question may be asleep, or perhaps at work or something.” “It’s not that early, though, is it?” I said (it was approaching 11 am by now). “Yes, yes, to some it is, it depends on who you ask. To you and me, it’s not very early, of course,” Jensen replied. “But to some of the citizens we encounter often, 11 o’clock is very, very early. These are people we typically only see after 3 pm. If they don’t have anything to do—no school, work, or education—then we see them in the streets at 3, and then they’re probably awake until, I don’t know, 1, 2, or 3 am, no matter what day it is.”
Jensen’s remarks reveal an acute awareness of the temporal and social rhythms of the neighbourhood, which is part of his regular beat, as well as of those well-known residents he deems to be of immediate ‘interest.’ And while it is precisely such contextual familiarity that renders the police nose useful in practice, it also follows that its inferences are often situated in a social field shaped by unequal relations of power. Put somewhat bluntly, to most police officers, a car parked in an affluent neighbourhood would be unlikely to index the same thing as it would in Hill Park. And so, regardless of its accuracy in specific situations, the ‘police nose’ thus also speaks to long-standing debates concerning the classed nature of suspicion and its broader implications regarding the trade-offs between discretion and accountability in policing.
I should interject here that this is not to suggest that Detective Jensen or any of his colleagues operate on prejudice—I have no indication to that effect whatsoever. My intention here is simply to leverage Jensen’s reflections to illustrate how what the police nose ‘smells’ is inevitably embedded both within broader structures of meaning and power as well as individual officers’ accumulated sensory experiences.
This tension has not gone unnoticed in Danish public debate, either. During the 2011 Roskilde Festival, for example, police requested that 25 Romani individuals identify themselves, and when questioned critically by a newspaper journalist, the on-duty officer explained: “It is our police nose that compels us to check up on the Roma bunch.” The reportage does not mention whether officers managed to ‘sniff out’ any illegal behaviour, but it stands to reason that few ethnic stereotypes are more tenacious than the one linking ‘Gypsies’ to petty crime and delinquency.
Eleven years later, Amnesty International explicitly flagged the possible association between the ‘police nose’ and the phenomenon of ‘ethnic profiling’ in Danish cities (Amnesty International Denmark 2022), following a publication documenting that “the risk of being charged without a subsequent conviction is 27% higher for immigrants than people of Danish origin. For descendants of immigrants, the risk of being charged without a subsequent conviction is 45% higher than it is for people of Danish origin” (Søndergaard and Hussein 2022, 3). The publication also led to this potential ‘dark side’ of the police nose being discussed by national politicians and police chiefs at the high-profile political festival on the island of Bornholm.
The smell of (ir)rational bureaucracy?
References to a ‘police nose’—or what is variously referred to in other contexts as a “sixth sense,” “gut feelings,” “hunches,” or even “intuition”—circulate among police officers as a shorthand for an almost instinctive ability to read and respond to subtle environmental cues in a distinctly ‘police-like’ way. The olfactory character of the metaphor, in turn, does not appear semantically incidental, as it evokes suspicion, vigilance, and an intuitive mode of noticing that something is ‘off’ before it is consciously articulated as such. This contrasts with visual and auditory metaphors, which often seem to signal rational processes—“I see” can mean “I understand,” for example—and resonates with the idea that “the sense of smell has fewer and less deep metaphorical connections with the mental domain” (Sweetser 1990, 43). The ‘police nose,’ indeed, seems to denote a pre-reflective rather than purely rationalistic mode of knowing and engaging with the world.
On the one hand, the ability to act on a fleeting je-ne-sais-quoi is a crucial part of the craft of everyday policing and is a skill that officers hone in practice as they immerse themselves in the rhythms, histories, and social makeup of their daily beats. On the other hand, the police nose is clearly not a neutral bureaucratic instrument, but rather a visceral pattern recognition tool that operates within structures of power and experience that co-condition what counts as ‘suspicious’ in the first place. As public and scholarly debate has highlighted, references to a police nose may thus run the risk of concealing implicit bias in discretionary policing behind a linguistic veil of vaguely defined expertise.
The police nose thus presents itself as a double-edged sword. As a professional ideal and sensory skill, it highlights the real importance of officers’ heightened situational awareness and responsiveness. At the same time, some contexts may be automatically assumed to “smell” more than others—and what smells, and to whom, is to a considerable extent shaped by a politics of inequality. And while no obvious silver bullet is available for resolving this tension, it remains something to be mindful of, as even the sharpest nose may lead us down a path that does not quite pass the sniff test.
Laust Lund Elbek is assistant professor at the University of Southern Denmark. His research lies at the intersection of social anthropology and political science, with a focus on state-citizen relations in highly securitized contexts.
References
Amnesty International Denmark. 2022. ”Det er jo en offentlig gabestok, og jeg ved godt, hvad Hr. og Fru Jensen, der kører forbi, tænker”. Copenhagen.
Eco, Umberto. 1979. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2002. The perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge.
Quin, Emily. 2025. ‘The Copper’s Nose’: A Grounded Theory of a Policing Phenomenon, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge.
Ramšak, Mojca. 2024. The Anthropology of Smell. New York: Springer.
Sausdal, David. 2018. Everyday Deficiencies of Police Surveillance: A Quotidian Approach to Surveillance Studies. Policing and Society 30(4):462-478.
Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics. Metaphorical and CulturalAspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Søndergaard, Jeppe Kirkelund, and Tarek Hussein. 2022. Etnisk Profilering: Hovedresultater fra tre undersøgelser. Danish Institute for Human Rights.
Cite as: Elbek, L. L. 2025. “Sniffing Out Trouble? What and how the ‘Police Nose’ Smells” Focaalblog December 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/24/laust-lund-elbek-sniffing-out-trouble-what-and-how-the-police-nose-smells/