A month has passed since the police killing of French-Algerian teenager Nael M at a traffic stop in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre. The police initially reported that the teenager had threatened to run over the officers, but a video circulating on social media contradicted this claim, showing that one of the two officers who had stopped his car shot Nael point blank in the head.
Nael’s killing on June 27 led to a massive uprising. Over 3,000 protesters were arrested between June 27 and July 15. Many of the protests saw violence breaking out. French security forces responded with repression and in the days following the killing of Nael, over 40,000 security personnel were deployed. The response of French President Emmanuel Macron and his administration was widely condemned, especially their failure to address the systemic issues that led to the killing. Media reports and activists pointed to the discrimination faced by people of Arab and African origin in France, the trend of youth from such communities being checked frequently at traffic stops, and a 2017 law that gave the traffic police a free hand in using lethal weapons.
Read more: A brutal colonial legacy is tinder for the fires that are sweeping across France
Left and progressive organizations have also condemned the government’s recent failure to intervene during a strike by the police against the detention of an officer who was involved in injuring a young man during the protests.
According to reports, police officers in Marseilles went on leave en masse or performed only emergency duties after their colleague was taken into custody on July 20 over charges of attacking and seriously injuring a 21-year-man named Hedi. The top brass of the French police, including national police chief Frederic Veaux and Paris police chief Laurent Nunez, shared its “uneasiness” about the officer being arrested. While Macron said that everyone was equal under the law, he indicated his empathy for the “emotion” of the police following the recent protests against police violence.
On July 24, Jean-Luc Melenchon from the leadership of the French left-wing New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NUPES) coalition said that “the government and its allies must pull themselves together and break with their complacency towards the factious and violent police organizations. They must restore obedience and republican discipline in the police. These parties must clearly condemn what is happening and take a stand in defense of the Republic.”
Succumbing to the public outcry, judicial bodies have now opened investigations into multiple cases of police attacks against civilians during the protests. This has irked a significant section of police officers, as witnessed in Marseilles.
L’Humanité reported that an investigation is also ongoing in the case of 22-year-old Abdelkarem Y, who was allegedly blinded in a police attack on the night of June 30 in Marseilles. On July 4, the Marseilles Prosecutor’s Office also opened an investigation into the death of 27-year-old Mohammed during protests in the city. Mohammed reportedly died after a violent shock to the chest caused by the firing of a Flash-Ball projectile by the police.
Earlier, on July 5, over 100 progressive organizations, including the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) and political parties like La France Insoumise (LFI), had issued a joint appeal to the authorities to formulate a holistic political response to combat police violence. Rallies were organized in multiple cities, demanding police reforms and the repeal of trigger-happy laws.
Meanwhile, the French right-wing has supported the police crackdown on the protests and accused immigrant and working-class youth from the suburbs of ‘rioting’ in the cities. A donation drive initiated by a far-right politician to support the family of the policeman who killed Nael collected €1.6 million ( $1.77 million).
Structural failures
The developments over the past month show the French state has failed to address the deep-seated structural issues that have led to incidents like the killing of Nael. For left-wing parties, trade unions, and other progressive forces, this remains the key issue to be addressed. Speaking to Peoples Dispatch a week after the mass protests began, Ramon Vila from the Sud Sante Sociaux union said that as France was a former colonial power, “there is still a feeling of superiority and domination towards the formerly colonized populations.” He talked about how the discrimination is manifested on a day-to-day basis. “It comes in the form of repeated police checks several times a day. A young person in these neighborhoods who is Black or North African is 20 times more likely to be stopped than a white person. Discrimination in recruitment is common based on your name or your address. Police violence against these young people is more frequent. This situation has been going on for years and years. It has gotten worse,” he noted.
Stephen Bouquin, an academic, said there is a clear pattern to such incidents. “A young Black or Arab person dies following a violent interaction with a policeman. The resulting collective emotion leads to rioting, scenes of violence, and confrontations with the police. ..With the return of law and order, the promises of solutions and the ‘de-ghettoization’ of the neighborhoods disappear.”
“The social problems are still the same, and they are piling up. Poverty, unemployment, job insecurity, failure at school, and dropping out of school are structural causes, superimposed on which are ethno-racial causes, with the feeling of exclusion, racism, Islamophobia, discrimination of all kinds, in particular discriminatory controls. The feeling of discrimination, along with the difficulties of finding a stable job, is fed by the logic of ghettoization that the urban renewal policy has not managed to break. And then there are the political causes, i.e. the fact that urban policy, which for a long time was a very complex patchwork, has been completely abandoned since François Hollande,” Bouquin added
Political responses will be decisive, Bouquin said. He pointed out that a key question is whether the executive will let the situation fester to legitimize its talk of order, or if it will take strong action.
President Emmanuel Macron recently reshuffled his cabinet and told his ministers to draw lessons from what happened and provide sound answers. However, he added that there was a need for “authority and respect,” a message he repeated during his trip to New Caledonia where he said, “Our country needs a return to authority at every level, starting with the family.” It is doubtful if the French state has learned any lessons.
