French Police In The Grip Of The Far-Right

Experts and specialists in the use of the police and behind it the French authorities read with the uprising of the suburbs in protest against the killing of the young man Nahel, a continuation of colonialism, but with new methods, this is the conclusion reached by the analyses of each of the historian Emmanuel Blanchard, the political analyst Fabian Jobard, and the sociologist Didier Fascin, the specialist in police affairs.
The specialists compared what happened to the young man “Nahel” at the hands of the French police and what the black American, George Floyd, was subjected to at the hands of the American police, and they agreed that what happened to the two victims was a continuation of colonial policies based on heinous police practices in their dealings with the youth of the suburbs and popular neighborhoods in some major French cities.
Emmanuel Blanchard, deputy director of the University of Political Sciences of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, says that sociologists and journalists have documented a notable increase in killings due to non-compliance with surveillance, in which police officers have been involved since 2017, which coincides with the adoption of a new police law that gave security forces a wide range of leeway that allows them to shoot the victims, who are usually either Arabs or Africans.
Blanchard, author of the book “The Parisian Police and the Algerians 1944-1962”, is at a dangerous point, which is that since the adoption of the 2017 law, the police weapon has been directed against a small group of French society, referring to the French coming from African or Arab regions, noting that France has a long history of “Iraqiization” of the police empire, which has been involved in five times more murders than in European countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom.
Blanchard, who teaches at the University of Versailles Saint-Montaigne or Yvelines, used the term “natives” when speaking about the situation of French people of Algerian descent, a term inherited from the French colonial period in Algeria, which means a second-class category of French citizens because of their non-French origin.
For his part, Didier Fascin, professor at the College de France and director of studies at the School of Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, drew attention to the way the police deal with suburban youth and to the political and electoral orientations of police officers, noting that two-thirds of police votes go to the far-right National Front party, from the leadership of the historical founder of this party, represented by Marie Le Pen, until his succession by his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who ran for the French presidential election in 2017 and competed in the second round with the current president, Emmanuel Macron, but lost the bet.
Didier Fascin believes that what both concerns and disturbs him is not personal racism, but institutional racism in the French police apparatus, which goes unpunished, whether at the level of individuals or at the level of unions that consider suburban youth to be a nuisance, The blame for this lies with the successive French governments, which have often given in to the demands of the police institutions and the trade unions and have not been able to carry out the necessary reforms, which have opened the way for this sector to be imbued with elements of non-French ethnicities in order to improve its work.
As for Fabien Jobard, a specialist in issues related to the police’s treatment of suburban youth and director of research at the French Center for Scientific Research, he maintains that republican law in the French state has not been able to correct the practices that characterize some attitudes, especially those related to surveillance and identification, and he did not hesitate to describe some of them as “barbaric,” practices that find cover in the law prepared by Raymond Bare’s government at the beginning of the eighties of the last century.