Purpose – Diversity recruitment and affirmative action strategies in the police are part of a range of proactive strategies to overcome a history of discrimination and exclusion of women and minority groups. One effort in the Swedish Police has been the rhetoric and campaigns of ‘widened recruitment’ (Sw: breddad rekrytering). This article identifies and outlines the discourse of widened recruitment within the Swedish police. More specifically, it shows how social categorizations and subject positions in relation to widened recruitment are constructed, challenged and reinforced.

Design– The empirical data is from field studies at the Swedish National Police Academy and from eight focus group interviews with police officers in trainee. The data is analysed with reference to critical discursive psychology.

Findings – This paper argues that positive intentions of the diversity agenda are challenged when police students with minority background are ascribed affirmative action and a quota system and thus placed in a subordinate position on less legitimized premises within the constabulary. As a parallel result, a constituted norm of white, Swedish, heterosexual men are made invisible in diversity rhetoric, hence rendered natural and more legitimized within the police. A dilemma emerges, between the call for representation of social (minority) groups and the risk of ascribing these groups as ‘others’. Voices of resistance from ethnic minority police women show how discourses of exclusion might jeopardize the police’s effort for inclusion.

Research limitations/implications – The data concerns the Swedish police but major findings should be applicable to other public institutions as well that deals with diversity recruitment. The paper, which is empirically based, deals with and nuances the paradoxical effort to recognize social categorizations on the one hand, and on the other disregard them.

Value – The paper contributes to the research field of adult education and the conference theme by addressing political efforts of inclusion in vocational and adult education, with research in the interface of education, policy and practice.