Opinion: the French government appear unwilling to examine how its police force operates and why it regularly acts with such violence
The short life of Nahel M., the 17-year-old shot dead by a policeman in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre last week, was bookended by police violence and revolt. He was born only months after the mass insurrection in the suburbs of France's major cities in 2005 following the tragic deaths of Zyed Benna (17) and Bouna Traoré (15), who were electrocuted while being pursued by the police despite not having committed any crime.
The unrest that has followed Nahel’s death has echoes of the 2005 revolt, though more limited in its reach and duration. While Nahel’s family and community are left to grieve the loss of a young man taken in his prime, the French state seems unwilling and unable to interrogate the structural causes of that police violence that took his life.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, CBS News correspondent in Paris Elaine Cobbe on continuing unrest across France
The French police’s recourse to violence in recent years has notably distinguished it from other police forces in Europe. As seen by controversies surrounding the policing of protest and crowd control, most notably at last year's Champions League final, police in France have largely eschewed the doctrine of de-escalation adopted by their peers in many other European countries. They also stand out for their comparatively higher propensity to deploy force in day-to-day policing.
A change made to the law in 2017 during the presidency of François Hollande, following pressure from police unions, expanded the circumstances in which police could deploy lethal force quite significantly. This has contributed to a rise in police shootings during traffic stops. While the killing of Nahel is the 16th fatal shooting for failure to comply with a traffic stop in the last 18 months in France, the German police has killed one person in similar circumstances in the last ten years. As sociologist Sebastian Roché has pointed out, the French police has killed more civilians than any other in Western Europe in the last 20 years.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland, France 24 reporter Clovis Casali on unrest in France following the police killing of a 17 year old
Coupled with this commonplace use of violence is an unacknowledged structural racism that permeates the forces of order in France. While the French state’s doctrine of colourblind republicanism forbids the collection of data on an ethnic or racial basis, a report produced by the official Defender of Rights in 2017 bore testament to the extent of racial profiling and discrimination in policing. It found that ‘young men perceived to be Arab or Black’ were 20 times more likely to be stopped by the police than the average citizen, three times more likely to report having been insulted and three times more likely to report having been assaulted during a stop. No significant changes were introduced off the back of this report.
In the years since this report’s publication, there have been numerous prominent examples of police violence against racialised youths from the suburbs. The death of the 24-year-old Adama Traoré while in police custody in 2016 sparked significant protest as did the police assault on 22-year-old Théo Luhaka during an arrest in 2017, and the unprovoked police beating of black music producer Michel Zecler in Paris in 2020.
READ: The French banlieues: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Alongside these dramatic incidents, stand the daily reality of the kinds of racist policing practices detailed in the report, which weigh heavily on the lives of racialised people across France. For the sociologist Kaouter Harchi, the exercise of violence against young men of colour from the suburbs is the result of a broader social stigmatisation that rids them of their humanity and makes them ‘killable’, ultimately installing a fatal logic that ends in incidents like the killing of Nahel.
While defenders of the police are quick to dismiss wider structural critiques of racism, the press release issued by two major police unions on Friday deployed the kind of language I am used to seeing in the reports of colonial officials in the early 20th century. Insisting on the need to ‘impose order’ on the ‘savage hordes’ in the suburbs, the unions called on the government to empower them to ‘combat these parasites’. They also warned that they would enter ‘into resistance’ once their 'war' against those revolting in the banlieues was finished, effectively threatening the government.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime, Emma Pearson from The Local France and Talking France podcast on the ongoing riots across France
Low pay and poor working conditions have certainly fuelled anger within the police force, as has the sense that they carry a large part of the burden of the broader social neglect of poorer suburbs. However, this has increasingly found its expression through an embrace of the far-right, both in the rhetoric of the police unions and at the polls, where a majority of police officers vote for Marine Le Pen.
While Emmanuel Macron has acknowledged the existence of racial profiling and police violence in the past, the policies adopted under his presidencies have done little to tackle these problems. His Minister for the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, is a security hardliner, nicknamed 'the top cop in France', who has refused to undertake any significant reform to policing practices.
The government refuses to use the term police violence, denying the existence of a structural problem with the use of force by police. In its defence of a case taken by organisations representing victims of racial profiling, the government dismissed the report produced by the Defender of Rights and extensive academic research from state-funded institutions, arguing that there is no racial profiling by police in France.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ 1's Nine News, French president Macron says shooting dead of teenager in France is 'unforgivable'
In response to Nahel’s death, Macron acknowledged the killing was 'inexcusable', but also described it as 'inexplicable' and he was more than happy to ascribe the violence that followed in the suburbs to 'video games and social media'. He refused to countenance the wealth of evidence that show how structures of racism and violence within the police can go some way to explaining how Nahel M. was killed last Tuesday.
The government’s brusque dismissal of calls by the UN's High Commissariat for Human Rights for France to tackle ‘deep problems of racism and racial discrimination’ in the police force suggest no major police reform is coming in the foreseeable future. Nor is there any plan for major investment in the disadvantaged suburbs. The last word is, perhaps, best left here to Feurat Alani, a journalist and onetime neighbour of Nahel’s in the Pablo-Picasso estate in Nanterre: "They say ‘there will be a before and an after’. In the eyes of the world, there was no ‘before’. They have already forgotten those killed by the police before Nahel. How can we believe in an ‘after’?"
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
