In Service to the State
Musab Younis
The point-blank shooting by police officers of 17-year-old Nahel M. during a traffic stop in Nanterre last Tuesday was not a unique occurrence. On 7 June, three weeks before Nahel’s death, police in Paris killed a 21-year-old passenger in a car that had allegedly refused to stop for a check. The passenger was not named in media reports; she was described only as a ‘young woman’. On 14 June, two weeks before Nahel’s death, a 19-year-old Guinean supermarket logistics worker, Alhoussein Camara, was shot dead near Angoulême at a roadside checkpoint.
According to one count, between 1977 and 2022, French police officers or gendarmes killed an average of 19 people a year, half of them under the age of 27. The frequency has increased. In the course of a single week during the first coronavirus lockdown (8 to 15 April 2020), five people died in France following police checks.
Without immediate video evidence, there tends to be little public outrage, and silence from politicians. When 22-year-old Abdelhakim Ajimi was asphyxiated by police officers in 2008 while both his feet and hands were cuffed, in front of eleven witnesses who testified that he was not resisting and appeared unconscious, there was very little reporting of the case. The police officers responsible were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and given suspended sentences; they remained on the force.
When Adama Traoré died of asphyxiation in police custody in 2016, the officers involved were cleared of wrongdoing by French courts. When Cédric Chouviat, a 42-year-old delivery driver and father of five, died after being asphyxiated by police officers in January 2020, those responsible were indicted for involuntary manslaughter. They are unlikely to face serious consequences. In a video of the arrest that was not disseminated at the time but released by Libération last year, Chouviat distinctly repeats nine times: ‘I’m suffocating.’
Much of this police violence is the result of police stops known as ‘les contrôles d’identité’ or identity checks. These are humiliating and invasive searches not only of adults but also of children as young as ten that can legally be carried out without suspicion of any crime. Official data are missing, but the Défenseur des droits, an independent human rights institution, found in 2016 that a ‘young man perceived to be Black or Arab’ was twenty times more likely to experience a police stop.
A Human Rights Watch report in 2020 found identity checks in France to be ‘abusive and discriminatory’, ‘heavy-handed’ and probably based on ‘ethnic profiling’. The organisation cited the case of an entire class of twelve-year-old children subjected to a police identity check as they were leaving school on a trip to the Louvre. After a high school protest in the town of Mantes-la-Jolie, northwest of Paris, in 2018, scores of schoolchildren were filmed kneeling in rows, some facing a wall, with their hands tied behind their backs or on their heads. ‘Now there’s a well-behaved class,’ a police officer remarked.
Nahel was of Moroccan and Algerian background. On 17 October 1961, towards the end of the Algerian war of independence, hundreds of Algerian protesters in Paris were forcibly drowned in the Seine. That history was recalled in April 2020, with the appearance of video footage of a man who had jumped into the Seine in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, to avoid police capture. ‘Bicots don’t swim,’ one officer laughed, using a racist term for Arabs. The man was fished out and put into a police van. The video ends with three simultaneous sounds: the screams of the arrested man, the blows visited on his body, and the laughter of police officers.
During the 1920s and 1930s, French colonial subjects who had come to the métropole from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean were closely monitored by a special police force, the Service de Contrôle et d’Assistance des Indigènes (CAI). Foreigners who were not colonial subjects could be expelled without judicial oversight and for overtly political reasons. Colonial subjects – harder to remove – were carefully tracked. Many Arabic and Vietnamese-language newspapers were shuttered.
As the architectural theorist Léopold Lambert has suggested, there is a ‘colonial continuum’ from the way France governed its colonies in the past to its racialised populations in the present. Neighbourhoods in which African, Asian and Arab-descended people now live are comparable to ‘colonised cities’ – in their underdevelopment and hostile architecture, but also in their rich histories of militancy.
The police are meanwhile active in defending their interests. Their unions are unafraid of stark messages. ‘Congratulations to the colleagues who opened fire on a young 17-year-old criminal,’ one of them tweeted after the killing of Nahel M. ‘By neutralising his vehicle, they protected their lives and the users of the road.’ (The tweet was later deleted.) French police officers lean disproportionately to the far right: polls often show them voting in a majority for the Rassemblement National. In periods of social unrest, they gain political strength as a bulwark against social movements. Macron’s tumultuous reign has been profitable. As the historian Emmanuel Blanchard has put it, ‘in the long history of the French police, the police are in service to the state, not the citizen.’ This makes them ‘impermeable to social reforms’.
In 2012, the interior minister Manuel Valls considered introducing legislation that would regulate identity checks. Police unions expressed strong opposition. The reforms were not implemented. In January 2020, following the asphyxiation of Cédric Chouviat, the government announced that it would ban the use of chokeholds during arrests. There was an immediate backlash from the police. Their unions met with the interior minister. The ban was reversed before it came into effect.
Comments
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6 July 2023
at
9:38am
Camus
says:
It all sounds like a glitch in the Programme. It was the latest in an endless series of attacks by the French police on the inhabitants of the Banlieus around all of the major cities. The only remedy would be a complete reeducation and reform of the police and its governing body and that is about as likely as a victory for a left wing candidate for the Presidency.
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11 July 2023
at
10:33pm
Damian Rainford
says:
Many thanks for this piece. Don't know why, until reading this, I had remained unaware of the awful terror that was the Paris Massacre of 1961. It doesn't seem to be given much of an airing and has no acceptance of responsibility.
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13 July 2023
at
6:26am
AR Duncan-Jones
says:
Given that politicians feel obliged to grovel before the police - and Darmanin certainly sees his future as their representative in government, perhaps it would be truer to say that the State is in service to the police.
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13 July 2023
at
8:32am
nicklyne
says:
This is why so many French police officers, and the institution itself, actively cooperated with the Germans between 1940 and 1944: they simply transferred their loyalty to the new state. And of course after the Americans and British liberated the country, it took the new French state four decades to admit to its predecessor's role in the holocaust. I might add that I lived in rural France for three years in the early noughties and was stopped by the Police during that period more times than in the 30 years I have lived in Spain. And I'm a white middle-aged male...
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13 July 2023
at
8:56am
Magaterry
says:
Macron is just pushing people to vote for the far right with his presidency. The country of "Lumières" is slowly becoming the country of darkness. No plans to incentivize the integration of "the other French". By keeping them in the HLM we are just skipping a problem. I fear that in 4 year time Le Pen will be elected. What a nightmare.
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17 July 2023
at
1:39pm
jamesmann
says:
But why should the facts of a brutal and racially prejudiced police and a national policy of social housing at moderate rent (HLM) force people to vote for the far-right?
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