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Unreasonable Force

Jeremy Harding

Lecturing at the Collège de France thirty years ago on the nature of the state, Pierre Bourdieu queried Weber’s notion that functioning states enjoy a monopoly of ‘legitimate physical violence’. Bourdieu already preferred the expression ‘legitimate and symbolic physical violence’, and in the lectures he commented: ‘One could even call it the “monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence”.’

In the last few years, the French police have overstepped the mark. The use of unreasonable force is nothing new. More worrying is the coincidence, on more than one occasion, of physical violence with sinister signals that make a mockery of the idea that the police are a ‘legitimate’ expression of symbolic violence on the part of the state. If they are, then France is in trouble. Take the case of Théo Luhaka, a 22-year-old youth worker arrested in Seine-Saint-Denis in 2017 during an altercation between a group of young men and police. After he was detained, Luhaka was assaulted with an expandable truncheon, leaving him with severe lesions of the anal sphincter and (it’s assumed) lifelong incontinence. A dark thought in a policeman’s head, or an abusive remark on the tip of his tongue, erupted in the real world. The violence of the racial symbolism – using a crowd-control weapon to rape a black man of Congolese origin, believed perhaps to be getting above his station (his uncle is a cabinet minister in DRC) – compounded the awfulness of the deed.

At the end of the following year, as the gilets jaunes began protesting, often violently, and the police reciprocated, there was a significant rise in the number of demonstrators with eye injuries, including blinding, caused by anti-riot projectiles aimed at the head, against every rule in the book. The symbolic use of day-glo jackets by the gilets jaunes had sent a clear message: don’t overlook us in the twilight areas of the economy, or pretend you haven’t seen us. The response from riot police was to acknowledge the visibility of the demonstrators and turn it against them: yes, we see you, but by the time this is over, some of you won’t be able to see us. At least forty people were wounded in the eyes during gilet-jaune protests; around thirty required surgery and nine of those had to have an eye removed. The UN raised the issue of violent policing in France; the Macron administration was dismissive.

Migrants and asylum seekers are also targeted with extreme messages. In mid-November, between two and three thousand migrants, camped under a motorway slip road on the outskirts of Paris, were dispersed; people were bused to shelters and provisional accommodation, but many were back on the streets within days. The following week, around 450 migrants, mostly Afghans, with NGO support, staged a protest camp in Paris, pitching their orderly rows of tents on the Place de la République. It was broken up by the police in short order. Migrants and NGO workers were pushed around; teargas was fired; a journalist was pinned to the ground and threatened with a beating. The mayor’s office was dumbfounded.

The confiscation of tents struck a familiar note. Violent dispersals became routine in Calais following the 2015 refugee crisis: destruction of shoes and sleeping bags, pepper spray on food and clothes, even on sleeping children. All this by way of reminding migrants that they have no place in France. Many are ‘sans papiers’; some of their asylum claims are unlikely to be met, if they haven’t failed already. But the law doesn’t state that they should be stripped of their possessions or trashed in a show of contempt that has nothing to do with the ‘legitimate’ symbolic violence that Bourdieu had in mind – or even Gérard Darmanin, France’s hard-bitten interior minister, who tweeted that images of police behaviour in the Place de la République were ‘shocking’.

But Darmanin is in a spot, and so are the security forces. Two days before the camp was dismantled, there was another, far more notorious policing disaster, when Michel Zecler, a music producer reprimanded at the door of his recording studio for not wearing a Covid mask, was set on by a gang of police. The beating was caught on CCTV. France has been warned more than once not to assume that racist policing only happens in America.

Within days the footage had been watched more than 12 million times. Macron posted on Facebook that the images ‘shame us’: ‘respect for the Republic’s values and professional ethics,’ he wrote, ‘must be central to the obligations of all our security forces.’ He also wrote that he would ‘never accept’ violence against French security forces: a reasonable remark if it weren’t for the fact that the country is embroiled in a debate about a new ‘global security’ law, which has just been voted through the Assembly, dividing Macron’s MPs and provoking an outcry from the press.

The offending item, article 24, proposes restrictions on citizens, and the press, when they film or photograph police going about their work; it also proposes restrictions on the publication of those images. (There is nothing in the proposed law against written reporting: it doesn’t cut it.) Article 24 is a defiant response from the Ministry of the Interior to recordings of police behaviour during the gilet-jaune protests in 2018 and 2019. It also aims to allay justifiable fears among the police that they are being filmed on duty, identified on social media and endangered in their private lives, as the big platforms indulge subscribers in their favourite pastime: the trending vendetta.

The government is on the back foot. It has said that it wishes to rule only against the use of footage for ‘malicious’ purposes. In November it took the unusual step of convening a committee to reconsider article 24, which astonished MPs, including many in Macron’s majority, who had doubts about the law in the first place. They worried that the parliamentary process was being taken out of their hands. Last weekend more than a hundred thousand demonstrators turned out across France to oppose the bill. It was an impressive show of dissent, under the circumstances. Much to his fury, Macron has been forced to interfere in day-to-day government and the parliamentary process, and to tell his minister of the interior that he has got the story wrong. Article 24 of the ‘global security’ bill will be rewritten by parliament, not committee. It may well die a death in the process.

france police

Comments

  • 1 December 2020 at 7:57pm
    Rod Miller says:
    Yes, the Zecler case is an appalling example of racist police brutality. But as the Gilets Jaunes and other recent cases (climate demonstrators for example) show, most cop violence in France has no racist character. That said, police excesses seem to be growing more egregious than ever under Macron as his policies widen the country's wealth gap.

    By the way, far more white Americans are killed by police every year than blacks. You just never hear about the white ones -- some of whom did nothing at all to deserve their fate. And not all blacks killed by US cops and then held up as innocent martyrs are innocent. Far from it, in at least one 'iconic' case.
    • 1 December 2020 at 8:28pm
      gavin.gav@gmail.com says: @ Rod Miller
      Maybe the French cops who don't have swastikas on their arms are not as racist as the ones that do. And maybe the fact that there are more whites in the States than blacks could account for something. Whether the fate of whites in the States is more 'deserving' than that of blacks isn't the kind of discussion an anti-racist would want to get into.
    • 1 December 2020 at 9:21pm
      CarpeDiem says: @ Rod Miller
      ".....By the way, far more white Americans are killed by police every year than blacks......."

      Could we please get some evidence for this claim ?
    • 2 December 2020 at 2:56am
      Graucho says: @ CarpeDiem
      https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/
      In very round numbers it would appear that twice as many white persons are killed by the police as black. I recall that only ten percent of the U.S. population is black however. Draw your own conclusions.
    • 2 December 2020 at 1:11pm
      Rod Miller says: @ gavin.gav@gmail.com
      Oh YES it's an exceedingly good topic for an anti-racist (or does "anti-racist" in your terms mean someone with an Agenda & a 1-dimensional view of reality?).
      Because I'm talking about Totally Innocent people, like Tony Timpa. You've never heard of him, I know.
      That's my point.
    • 2 December 2020 at 1:22pm
      Rod Miller says: @ CarpeDiem
      Yes, we certainly could. These guys are evidence-based academics, not polemicists.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8fndiNZimA&feature=emb_logo
    • 2 December 2020 at 1:27pm
      Rod Miller says: @ Graucho
      Conclusions? I'd suggest you shun simplistic, 1-dimensional conclusions.
      Check the discussion I posted above for CarpeDiem. There's a complex reality involved. Let's allow it the full three dimensions it deserves.
    • 2 December 2020 at 3:32pm
      Charles Evans says: @ Rod Miller
      It's amazing to find on the LRB Blog, of all places, a cabal of commenters who want to throw up a smokescreen and pretend that racism isn't real (or at least diminish its effects). The only people that could possibly be helping are racist wrongdoers. Why might one want to help them? I think we know the answer implicitly.
    • 2 December 2020 at 5:42pm
      Ted Eames says: @ Rod Miller
      "...and not all blacks killed by US cops and then held up as innocent martyrs are innocent...". So that make extra-judicial killing ok does it???
    • 2 December 2020 at 6:35pm
      Graucho says: @ Rod Miller
      I concluded from one video showing an enebriated black man running away from a policemen being shot dead in a parking lot and another of a black man being shot seven times and crippled while getting into a car with his kids that "To protect and to serve" is not universally observed by all U.S. police officers, many of whom appear to be so trigger happy as to be a menace to public safety. In the Breonna Taylor case they fired 32 shots, missed the the boyfriend who was armed and killed his girlfriend who wasn't. .
      If you are black in the U.S. you are far more likely to be killed by a police officer than if you are white. Whether that happens because if you are black you are more likely to be poor and therefore more likely to come into contact with the police or because there are racist police officers is splitting hairs. U.S. policing needs reform.

      For what it's worth I think BLM were incredibly naive in the way they campaigned. It really hurt the Democrats in the down ticket vote in the election.

      By the way the two and a half times as likely to be killed by police if you are black quoted in the video is a gross statistical under estimate as noted in a post below.

    • 2 December 2020 at 8:41pm
      Rod Miller says: @ Charles Evans
      LOL So I get accused by you of being a racist (as a Christian fundamentalist might accuse anyone who disagrees with them as being a Satanist). The last resort of someone who's run out of convincing arguments.

      Nobody's saying racism doesn't exist. It just doesn't explain things the way you want all the pieces to fit neatly in your simplistic vision.

      I regret that the world isn't as straightforward as you would like. But it isn't.
    • 2 December 2020 at 8:45pm
      Rod Miller says: @ Ted Eames
      Lord, another cheap strawman "argument".

      If your objection is extrajudicial killing, you'd better be equally outraged by the far more numerous extrajudicial killings of non-blacks. If not, who's the racist here?
      Why do I suspect you aren't?
    • 2 December 2020 at 9:03pm
      Rod Miller says: @ Graucho
      I never found the "post below".

      Yes, no Kidding the cops need fixing (in France, the UK, the US, practically everywhere). So talking about race in this respect is indeed splitting hairs.

      And there are wayyyy too many guns in the US.

      Here's Tony Timpa's death (recorded on body cam). Note that at least one cop is black.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c-E_i8Q5G0
    • 3 December 2020 at 1:16am
      Graucho says: @ Rod Miller
      This was the post below...

      mary mc guinness says:
      According to researchers at Harvard University, a black person is 6 times more likely to be killed by police than a white person. Whilst whites are the largest single category of victims, blacks and hispanics together are more numerous.
      Even if the victims are not "innocent", it doesn't justify kiĺling them!
      In France racism certain exists amongst the police. Certain police officiers have recently gone public in the press on the question.

      Even my crude round numbers from statista.com say 5 times as like.
    • 3 December 2020 at 6:27pm
      Graucho says: @ Rod Miller
      P.S. Police reform in the U.K. and France will not be about preventing them killing truck loads of their own citizens each year as it should be in the U.S.
    • 3 December 2020 at 9:15pm
      Paul M says: @ Rod Miller
      You might claim not to have heard of any, but you can, and should, speak for yourself.

      The police killing of James Chasse in Portland Oregon in 2006 caused considerable outrage and lead to years of campaigning in the city, which reverberates to this day. It ultimately lead to the civil rights case: United States vs City of Portland. James Chasse, like Timpa, had a history of mental illness and the case came about because of a high number police killings of people with mental illness. It is notable for finding that people with mental illness where the primary recipients of police use of force.

      It should be no surprise that the most marginalised are those most likely to be on the wrong end of such violence, nor is it likely to surprise anyone, who has put any thought in, that the contributing factors are complex and cannot be easily reduced. Of note though, many of those killed, disproportionately so, in what is America's whitest city, were black. The figures speak for themselves: race clearly plays a very big part. It does an ugly disservice to the topic not to acknowledge this.
    • 3 December 2020 at 9:19pm
      Paul M says: @ Rod Miller
      You might claim not to have heard of any, but you can, and should, speak for yourself.

      The police killing of James Chasse in Portland Oregon in 2006 caused considerable outrage and lead to years of campaigning in the city, which reverberates to this day. It ultimately lead to the civil rights case: United States vs City of Portland. James Chasse, like Timpa, had a history of mental illness and the case came about because of a high number police killings of people with mental illness. It is notable for finding that people with mental illness where the primary recipients of police use of force.

      It should be no surprise that the most marginalised are those most likely to be on the wrong end of such violence, nor is it likely to surprise anyone, who has put any thought in, that the contributing factors are complex and cannot be easily reduced. Of note though, many of those killed, disproportionately so, in what is America's whitest city, were black. The figures speak for themselves: race clearly plays a very big part. It does an ugly disservice to the topic not to acknowledge this.
    • 3 December 2020 at 9:20pm
      Paul M says: @ Rod Miller
      You might claim not to have heard of any, but you can, and should, speak for yourself.

      The police killing of James Chasse in Portland Oregon in 2006 caused considerable outrage and lead to years of campaigning in the city, which reverberates to this day. It ultimately lead to the civil rights case: United States vs City of Portland. James Chasse, like Timpa, had a history of mental illness and the case came about because of a high number police killings of people with mental illness. It is notable for finding that people with mental illness where the primary recipients of police use of force.

      It should be no surprise that the most marginalised are those most likely to be on the wrong end of such violence, nor is it likely to surprise anyone, who has put any thought in, that the contributing factors are complex and cannot be easily reduced. Of note though, many of those killed, disproportionately so, in what is America's whitest city, were black. The figures speak for themselves: race clearly plays a very big part. It does an ugly disservice to the topic not to acknowledge this.
    • 4 December 2020 at 10:33pm
      freshborn says: @ Rod Miller
      I don't think the LRB should be allowing the initial comment here to be published, it is clearly racially motivated and includes invented statistics, insinuating that black people killed by the police deserve it, and it has little to do with the topic in the piece to begin with. I don't know what the benefit of allowing these inflammatory comments to be posted because it could never lead to a civil discussion, it just wastes the time of the decent people who are disproving the assertions.
    • 5 December 2020 at 8:49pm
      Rod Miller says: @ Graucho
      »Even if the victims are not "innocent", it doesn't justify kiĺling them!«

      So who said it does?? You are implying Me. This is known as a Strawman Argument.

      Kindly discuss seriously.
    • 5 December 2020 at 9:07pm
      Rod Miller says: @ Paul M
      "(...) a high number police killings of people with mental illness. It is notable for finding that people with mental illness where the primary recipients of police use of force (...) the contributing factors are complex and cannot be easily reduced (...)"

      Thank you for restating my argument in another way.
      But you then contradict yourself by saying that the figures speak for themselves, which is highly Simplistic. And Glenn Loury and John McWhorter beg to differ. (The following link makes a pair with the one I posted above of the same two discussing.)
      Loury says police encounters are "where the rubber meets the road". Of COURSE neither pretends there isn't a lot of bad policing out there. But both believe that the problem -- and the solution -- ultimately lie within the black community itself.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mNfxayyNfk&feature=emb_logo
    • 5 December 2020 at 9:19pm
      Rod Miller says: @ freshborn
      No, it is clearly Not "racially motivated". There are no "statistics", only vague proportions -- which nobody would dispute. Your inference of "insinuation" is Highly subjective.

      Speaking of questionable insinuation, Harding's remark that "France has been warned more than once not to assume that racist policing only happens in America" is laden with it.

      I live a stone's throw from the French border, speak the language, and spend a lot of time there. You'll get no argument from me that there's a real problem with the use of state force in France.

      The more interesting subject is the US -- a subject introduced by the author himself.
    • 6 December 2020 at 1:07am
      Graucho says: @ Rod Miller
      »Even if the victims are not "innocent", it doesn't justify kiĺling them!«
      I didn't say it, it was in the original post referenced if you had bothered to use Ctrl-F to find it.
    • 8 December 2020 at 1:14pm
      Rodney says: @ freshborn
      I agree. One of the joys of the LRB is to read informed letters (and comments) that expand an article, sometimes critically, always intelligently. I don't subscribe to be plunged into a facebook style bun-fight.
    • 11 December 2020 at 3:41pm
      Coldish says: @ Rod Miller
      There exists data supporting the conclusion that in the USA, a male person being arrested by police is more likely - by a factor of almost 2 - to be killed during the arrest if he is white than if he is black or hispanic. This was discovered by independent 'melanin-deficient' (his own description) researcher Willis Eschenbach using relevant published data from the whole USA in the year 2015. See his blog at rosebyanyothernameblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/31/when-arrests-go-bad/
      Eschenbach goes on to emphasise that his "...result says nothing about the existence of racist police officers in America. Sadly, while the situation is immensely better than in my youth, we know that there are still far too many racists in the US … including in the police forces."
      He speculates on a possible contributory cause for this state of affairs, ascribing it to "...arrogance. In my experience, white guys of the kind who run afoul of the law are more likely to challenge and mouth off to the cops, and are more apt to believe they’re invincible, bulletproof, and above the law."
      Eschenbach provides the sources of his data to enable readers to confirm or refute his argument.
    • 11 December 2020 at 11:02pm
      Graucho says: @ Coldish
      This is misleading. What the piece in the link actually says is ...

      Here are the results of that comparison for 2015.

      For every 10,000 white people arrested for a violent crime, 38 white people were killed by police (± 2).
      For every 10,000 hispanic people arrested for a violent crime, 21 hispanic people were killed by police (± 3).
      For every 10,000 black people arrested for a violent crime, 21 black people were killed by police (± 2).

      Note the "for a violent crime" qualification.
      What has people up in arms is black people being shot when the offence in question is either trivial or non-existent.
      Indeed if the figures in the link are correct then removing arrests for violent crimes from the figures will result in showing that blacks even more than six times as likely as whites to be killed by the police when the offence in question is trivial or non-existent.
  • 1 December 2020 at 8:42pm
    Peter Ford says:
    Anybody who witnessed the police brutality against peaceful anti-lockdown marchers in Lobdon on 28 November will know that this country is not far behind France in this department. Police quickly formed a ring around marchers thrown to the ground to prevent the brutality being filmed.
    • 2 December 2020 at 10:33am
      John Barlow says: @ Peter Ford
      Peter Ford makes an enormous logic leap that police in the UK are "not far behind France". I make no comment on the incident he refers to but for some years have monitored the use of force by Thames Valley Police.
      Complaints are investigated (within TVP) by the Professional Strandards Department and reports are seen by a panel of lay people who raise any questions they think fit and comment without favour.
      Having personally observed the training of officers in the use of force it is surprising how few injuries are sustained by detained people resisting arrest!
      Complaints may also be considered by the Independent Office of Police Conduct and each Police Force is inspected by Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabularies.
      I do not argue that we have perfection by any measure but to suggest that the UK police are comparable to the observations in Jeremy Harding's article is absurd.
    • 2 December 2020 at 4:40pm
      Peter Ford says: @ John Barlow
      You weren't there. I saw brutality with my own eyes against peaceful protesters offering no resistance. How to complain with filmed evidence when police prevent filming?
    • 2 December 2020 at 7:45pm
      John Barlow says: @ Peter Ford
      Hence my "no comment" on the incident.

      The debate though is about drawing conclusions that the entire UK police should be considered. Given that you have serious points to make about the French police - make them, but don't deduce that the UK police are brutal.
  • 1 December 2020 at 10:41pm
    mary mc guinness says:
    According to researchers at Harvard University, a black person is 6 times more likely to be killed by police than a white person. Whilst whites are the largest single category of victims, blacks and hispanics together are more numerous.
    Even if the victims are not "innocent", it doesn't justify kiĺling them!
    In France racism certain exists amongst the police. Certain police officiers have recently gone public in the press on the question.
  • 2 December 2020 at 11:57am
    ChrisT says:
    Always a dangerous game to play who is more racist, us or them. One thing we have to remember though is France still runs an Empire, it’s bureaucrats and police are happy to be dispatched to runTahiti . The euro is good in the French Caribbean, ask a French bureaucrat if these countries should ever be in independent and they roll their eyes and say like what the British did? They consider the people wishing for their independence to be no more mature than children, incapable of self management. It’s white supremacism, they live it and work it every day, so don’t be surprised when their police come out swinging when black people need to be taught a lesson
  • 2 December 2020 at 9:28pm
    olywood says:
    Might have also been worth mentioning Alexandre Benalla - Macron's bodyguard who was caught (again, on camera) posing as a police officer on his days off to beat up protesters - an incredible scandal that Macron was lucky to distance himself from enough to retain his seat. Also, to put thing into context, France now spends more on defense than anywhere else in Europe, in 2018, they even out-budgeted Russia. They are a highly militarised country with, as COVID has demonstrated, the powers and infrastructure to control their own population at a moments notice. I don't know the precise criteria of a police state, but if they wanted to become one, it wouldn't prove much of a challenge. No matter how things shape up at home, I fully expect them to be a conspicuous presence abroad over the next few decades, possibly the rest of the century. They never got over Algeria, and if I was sticking my neck out a bit further, I wouldn't be particularly surprised to see them snatching up parts of North Africa again.
    • 5 December 2020 at 9:32pm
      Rod Miller says: @ olywood
      "I wouldn't be particularly surprised to see them snatching up parts of North Africa again."

      *I* certainly would.

      Benalla was an egregious case, and Macron ought not to have been able to wriggle out of it so easily. Agreed.

      Whether the government's "powers and infrastructure to control (the) population at a moments notice" are any greater than Britain's is doubtful. And don't forget that the French are imbued with the refreshing reflex to hit the bricks in loud protest, much more so than can be said for most other European countries (UK included).

      Don't forget that the Fifth Republic was tailor-made for de Gaulle. It really is time for this system of ultra-centralized power to be dismantled.
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