Policing the Inner City in France, Britain, and the US

S. Body-Gendrot, C. de Wenden, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137428004
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyzes and compares the police's inner city presence in France, the US, and Britain. Its authors' research points to the idea that the creation of a more inclusive environment is a sound approach for cities looking to better maintain peace, reduce discrimination, and manage the dynamic between police and citizens in inner cities.

1

Introduction

Abstract: Most Western cities experience difficult encounters between the police and marginalized youths in the inner cities. Some of them may lead to unrest which is disturbing for the localities where they occur. A cross-national comparison is treacherous because countries are not of the same size, the institutions respect common law or civil law, the state intervenes more or less in social processes, anti-discrimination policies have diverse degrees of legitimacy, rebellious youths have different profiles and so do policemen in the three observed countries. The complexity of such comparisons prevents simplistic universalism and ethnocentrism. The aim of such research is to start a debate on very complex issues.

Body-Gendrot, Sophie and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden. Policing the Inner City in France, Britain, and the US. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137428004.0003.

The relationship between police, young residents, and minorities from European marginalized inner cities has, for a long time, been a culture of denial, as if those living there would be illegitimate or second- class citizens because they are poor, young, and of foreign origin, permanently questioning the status of their citizenship. In these areas, the interaction between police and young people are difficult for most inhabitants of inner cities, requiring more protection, while demanding the end of police abuse. The problem is typical in various ways of many cities in the Western world:

patrolling these areas, and stopping and searching contribute to a decrease in crime, while minority youths complain about harassment, do not trust the police and claim that institutions do not listen to their grievances. These grievances gave rise to riots and violence in France, and in Britain during the 1980s, 1990s and the 2000s, but specifically in 2005 in France and in 2011 in England, the United States experiencing less riots than criminal violence in inner cities.

There are relatively few comparative studies on policing, race/ethnicity, space, and the management of social order. This research is based on interviews with youths, police organizations, elected officials, and residents in the banlieues and inner cities in France, Britain, and the US. We were members of two independent commissions. In the first, Groupe d’études et de luttes contre les discriminations (2000–2003), we conducted a two-year seminar of research based on qualitative interviews with policemen of all ranks, experts on cities’ problems and policy-makers in charge of such issues. We examined and analyzed all of the files from the toll-free number (114) open to victims of discrimination and the follow up given to their claims. In the second national commission, during our six years at the Commission Nationale de Déontologie sur la Sécurité (CNDS), we heard hundreds of testimonies from residents of inner cities claiming to have been victims of police and other law enforcer discrimination as well as the presumed authors of the wrong doing (policemen, counsels, lawyers, and mayors). We synthesized and made recommendations for each case at the national level as well. Another field study conducted among young people of immigrant background entering the French army completes our views on identities of second and third generations, and their experience with ethnic discrimination of the military institution. Our doctoral students leading field research on this topic have also enriched our approach to the issue. We analyze the contexts in which youth grievances turn into conflicts and confrontations. Despite apparent similarities, the controlled populations have different profiles in the three countries. In France and Britain, most are citizens of immigrant origin from former colonial empires; in the US, they belong to racial minorities. In the US and Britain, the awareness of their rights comes from a long experience of protest, channeled via organizations at either the community or the national level.

Solutions are rarely found in interactions with the police in France, where the national police are required to maintain order in peripheral neighborhoods. The young male populations living there frequently complain about ethnic profiling and the impunity benefiting public employees, even in the case of obvious discriminatory behaviors. They are seen by policemen as potential suspects, as idle male youths, even if the latter potential of violence is of low intensity. Policemen themselves have a discretionary power leaving them free to make choices. Dworkin calls this police discretion, ‘the hole in the doughnut’, in which discretion is the empty area in the middle of a ring of policies and procedures (Dworkin, 1977: 37). Yet despite such power, police officers feel despised by populations of inner cities and they lose their own self-esteem, complaining about the absence of support from their intermediary hierarchy, poor living standards, continuous reforms, changes in objectives, and a lack of proper initial and continuous training.

This unease is also perceived in the UK which represents a middle-way in terms of decentralization, attempting at the top to make officers more accountable, while in the US, the diversity of the 17,000 police forces, the contexts in which they operate and their various modes of policing yield more case by case schemes. The focus on large cities reveals that minority representation within police forces in the US, considered as a model for European countries, may differ but does not necessarily imply that tensions are less important in marginalized areas when a police chief is a minority member.

Anti-discrimination policies have been developing since the end of the 1990s following European and national agendas. European directives, national laws and cases have been examined by the European Court of Human Rights and by national courts. But police abuse, although not a current practice, is minimized, as in the US, where in courts the word of police officers is far more important than that of discriminated victims, although such events have become less frequent, with a stronger impact of court decisions and anti-discrimination policies.

The main question of this research is how the police can be reformed and how each country tries to do so, offering more inclusive models and practices of citizenship. It is in each countries’ interest to reform their police force and offer such models because the aforementioned youths are either current or future national citizens. One way to do it is by reflecting on racism and discrimination in inner cities where police culture is acquired on the job, and influenced by the practice of ethnic profiling, which sometimes mixes international and domestic security issues. Another approach is to examine whether the composition of the police force is reflective of multicultural populations, and if policemen with an immigrant or a minority background benefit from the same advancement opportunities and respect accorded to their “white” counterparts.

The treacherous nature of cross-national comparisons

Is a cross-national comparison possible on such issues? Does it make sense to attempt a comparison between a vast territorial, multiracial, and multiethnic world superpower with a relatively short history with two European nation-states molded by centuries of traditions, legal cultures, and political institutions (Body-Gendrot, 2012: 13)? This may be like comparing roses and peonies, yet it is done frequently within a long and well-established tradition emphasizing American “exceptionalism” (to quote Tocqueville, then Lipset (1996): each of us is in some ways like everybody else, in some ways like somebody else, and in some ways like nobody else. What is true of individuals is also true of countries and nations.

The US was created differently, and has to be understood on its own terms and within its own context. Its complex immigrant heritage, its long, checkered history of race relations, its political, institutional, and cultural responses to social challenges, all make this society a uniquely valuable source of insight and experience. It opens comparisons of commonalities and divergences with European countries, as pointed out by Marshall (1997: ix, 2001).

Without even mentioning the gaps occurring in data measurement, the misleading nature of comparisons cannot be minimized. To list just a few problems: comparing countries of different sizes and tracing parallel dimensions between a long past molded by regal power, then revolutions on one hand, and on the other, half a continent with a short history of law and order comprised of 50 states, may lead to oversimplification. The institutions are different. Furthermore, the nature and seriousness of violence sets the American experience apart. It is not simply a question of numbers. The crime rate is six or seven times higher than in Europe with variations according to the types of crime and places, namely inner cities. It is a question of the nature of crime. In the past, violence has been very much on the side of the forces of law and of the established citizens. Populism has resulted from the weakness of institutions. Menaces to social stability at various times in American history (the Frontier, the beginning of the industrial era, communities’ evolution confronting massive immigration) have led “solid citizens” to ally to the cause of order and punitive communalism, and take the law into their own hands. The absence of a feudal past, the strength of the Protestant religion, the weakness of the central state characterize the US, leading to binary visions of the elected winners, the “deserving entitled,” abiding by social conventions, and of the nondeserving losers. James Whitman (2003) points out the comparative harshness of American punishment and blames the absence of aristocratic codes of behavior which, in Europe, gradually granted offenders the treatment previously reserved for elite offenders, which is largely absent in the US (think of the French Director of the International Monetary Fund [IMF], handcuffed, shown on all televisions and sent to Rikkers Island in 2012 like any ordinary criminal).

Differences are also explained by other dimensions. Street crime linked to crack epidemics, gang warfare, and fights evoke the “American romance with guns” (Cole, 2012: 48). There are as many guns as people in America, according to estimates 45% of American households possess a gun. According to a Pew research poll, more Americans (49%) favor gun rights than gun control (45%) in 2012. It would be difficult not to draw a correlation with the number of violent deaths, including homicides in this country. Eight more blacks are killed by guns than whites, a statistic which raises the issue of race that will be developed below. The size of the incarcerated population, unique in the Western World with over two million people locked up and over five million under judicial supervision, along with the persistence of capital punishment are also unique features of American criminal law.

A major difference between France on one hand and on the other hand, the US and Britain, has to do with the nature of law. Two highly influential legal traditions characterize the Western world: civil law and common law. English and American laws are based on common law, that is, on tradition. Moreover, in the US, constitutional rights are the basis of American identity. By contrast, civil law in France dates back to the 13th century and after monarchy, was submitted to the Napoleonic Code which enunciated powerful, rigid administrative rules, hard to enforce, by comparison with the flexible rules of common law countries which were rigorously enforced (Tocqueville, 1961 6, 14).

Following Lijphart (1999), one should distinguish consensual (or socio-democratic corporatist) countries such as France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries in Europe—from majoritarian, neo-liberal, conflictual democracies (the majorities dictate the choices, they are also more populist) including Anglophone countries such as Britain and the US Consensual democracies are more welfare-friendly, more prone to trade-offs and moderate criminal policies, relying on a lenient “culture of excuse.” Majoritarian democracies express more severity, more punishment to the alleged nondeserving (Lappi-Seppala, 2011). Procedures and/or images referring to law and order issues reveal what is embedded in the subconscious of societies. In contrast with the US, there may be less absolute respect for rules of procedures, and less litigiousness in Europe. Punitive populism and the harshness of sanctions are not as exacerbated as they may be in parts of the US, both in rhetoric and in practice. The fact that judges are not elected makes them less prone to political pressures than is the case in parts of the US where the harshness of punishment is not considered as unequal treatment (Body-Gendrot and Savitch, 2012: 15–16). The rules of common law are like the rules of a game that is constantly readjusted. Politicians, police, and judges are accountable to the people who appoint or elect them. They have to find a rationale and empirical regulations to conflicts of interests emanating from heterogeneous individuals or communities. Conversely, in France, law is conceived as part of a transcendental sphere (Garapon, 1996). Those who say, interpret, repair or enforce the law are seen as invested in a symbolic action at the demand of a political body. Their role is to strengthen the link between the people and a social, political, philosophical contract above them that has been disrupted by violence or crime.

In the US and in the UK, the role of the state should remain limited to emergency situations (i.e., the rescue of banks, protectionism). The state is not at the foundation of collective identity or solidarity, as it is in France. Citizenship is not a recurring national debate. National intervention in social processes in order to redress inequalities is perceived as suspicious as it implies a form of socialism, contrary to the ideology of laissez-faire (Body-Gendrot and Savitch, 2012: 14). Only 16% of Americans support such an intervention versus 75% to 80% of the French, depending on the year (Gallup, 2011). What the French think ideologically (on the right/on the left) is more important in the definition of their identity than what they are.

However, in societies where the recognition of differences in identity prevail, anti-discriminatory policies based on the legitimacy of minorities’ rights, and on equal opportunity are supported by majorities. They encourage the search for solutions via a pluralism of public actors, firms, and third sector parties in various forms of governance. In the three countries, research shows that correlations exist between racial/visible minorities, poverty, single-parent families, school drop-outs, disinvested urban zones and potential crime, and collective disorders calling for police surveillance. But where negative perceptions correlate them with racial minorities in the US, they do so with the former African and Arab immigrants, in France and with both racial minorities and newly arrived immigrants in the UK. Such generalizations need to be reviewed according to other factors such as class, age, gender, location, time of settlement, and so on.

The institutional recognition of racism

Another difficulty of this research has to do with the institutional recognition, be it accorded, or not, to racism. While there has been an explosion of writing on theoretical debates related to race and racism, French scholars have been slow to come forward and join these discussions, with certain significant exceptions. A pioneer, Colette Guillaumin, published a seminal work in 1972, L’idéologie raciste: génèse et langage actuel (Guillaumin, 1972). In the same trend, Véronique De Rudder and her colleagues worked on inter-ethnic relations (1991) while Daniele Lochak reflected on the concept of discrimination, offering a legal point of view on what could be done to protect foreign migrants from unfair practices (Lochak, 1992. In 1988, Pierre-André Taguieff published La force du préjugé. Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles, a major edited book. That very same year, E. Balibar, in a dialogue with I. Wallerstein, pointed out that a major difference opposed France and the US in their models of immigrant and minority integration: while Americans promoted the ethnicization of minorities, France, perceiving itself as an ethnically homogeneous country, promoted the ethnicity of majorities (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1988: 20).

But one must acknowledge that there has been a general reluctance to discuss racism among French intellectuals who saw the issue through the historical lens of anti-semitism. In 1992, during a meeting of French social scientists, the use of the term race was heavily discussed. Being devoid of substance, should it be removed from the French Constitution? Some scientists argued that even if racism was real, the concept of race was unscientific. Nevertheless, there was no insistence on the need to “ban” the term, and studies of race continued to emerge in France. Because of the French history of ethnicized religious strife, the racial quotas imposed to on Jews during World War Two, and the explicitly racist legislation in Algeria and other French colonies, there is a historic wariness on the part of public officials to deploy racial categories, especially when fighting ethnic and racial discriminations. A popular French mode of thinking was expressed by former President Pompidou, asserting that merely mentioning a term calls for the idea and then makes it reality. While French scholars did, indeed, recognize that complex identities, including racial ones, are constructed through time and place, individually and collectively (Hall, 1991), this acknowledgment occupied a minor position compared with debates on inequalities, poverty, and social justice. Racism in France came to be understood broadly, to include “any form of violence exerted against another human group, from prejudice and/or contempt to discrimination; from segregation to random or organized murder,” thus, as any form of hostility toward a designated group (e.g., anti-youth, anti-cops, etc.) (Guillaumin, 1994: 67–68). An illustration of this particularly French designation applies to conflicts between youths and police forces in low income and immigrant neighborhoods. This is the object of this study. It is only very recently, in 2012, that a dictionary with hundreds of items recapitulated various forms of historical and critical approaches to racism (Taguieff, 2012). Still, countries such as the US and the UK have given recognition to institutional racism which uncovers and exposes ideological and political racism buried in the practices and institutional cultures of housing, work, school, health, and police work; and they have attempted to redress these problems. In contrast, France remains silent on questions of potential institutional racism. Unions protect public employees and strongly resist debates on racism in general. As Poli (2001: 198) observed in France, “the first reaction to questions related to racism is silence.” Currently, however, there is an agreement that the concept needs to be qualified. There is an emerging consensus around the idea of race as a “political object referring to boundaries between social inclusion and exclusion” (Balibar, 2005: 14–15) and to rights and legitimate grievances.

Finally, the term “inner city” needs some clarification. While referring to the studies of the sociologists of the School of Chicago in the 1920s, the inner city in the US is historically close to the business district—that is, at the core of the city. With the improvement of transportation, the gentry consistently relocated to more amenable suburbs which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Contexts of Grievances
• 3  Visible Minorities: Citizenship and Discrimination
• 4  Policing the Inner Cities
• 5  Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index