TEHRAN (Iran News) –No end appears in sight to public anger over ongoing police racism in France along with discriminatory and violent measures against minority groups.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of angry people took to the streets nationwide to protest against the use of force by French police, arguing that state authorities are refusing to recognize and address the racist approach of the police.

Protesters in the suburbs of Paris, where marginalized communities have long complained of police discrimination, came under attack by officers, with clashes and shuffles breaking out.

The fatal shooting of a teenager with a minority background in Paris in June, which critics described as “execution style”, triggered over a week of violent unrest in the capital Paris and elsewhere.
In Paris, protesters of all ages and walks of society held up placards reading “Stop state violence”, “Don’t forgive or forget” and “The law kills”.

The protesters were heeding a call by the leftist parties in France to take to the streets.

The demonstrators took particular aim at a law passed in 2017, article 435-1 of the internal security code, which expanded the powers of French forces to use firearms and shoot at what they consider to be acts of non-compliance.

Critics have accused the police of widely misusing the new power that they enjoy.

Analysts say there is racism in France, especially if you are a non-white youth, and that article 435-1 has been used by police in a discriminatory fashion against minority groups.

Unions said some 80,000 people joined the protests across France, including 15,000 in Paris.

The latest demonstrations sparked by the controversial fatal police shooting of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of Moroccan and Algerian descent in late June, have once more raised the question that French police unfairly target ethnic minorities.
While French authorities continue to claim that the national police have no problem with racism, research suggests the opposite.

Data shows that minorities are more than often targeted with discriminatory force during police searches as well as the level of violence against them in comparison with the rest of the population.

All of the victims from at least 16 fatal police shootings during traffic stops that have been recorded in France over the last 18 months have been men who are non-white.

Racism, discrimination, and stop-and-search are part of the racial profiling of many police forces in Western society, experts say.

But when it comes to acknowledging racism within the police ranks, France has a problem of not accepting the facts, which critics say will never pave the way to solving the problem.

After the killing of Merzouk, people took to the streets to protest against police violence and the excessive use of force in France’s poor and multi-ethnic suburbs. The five days of rioting that followed the Merzouk death brought back memories of riots in 2005 that were set off by the electrocution of two teenagers – a Black African and a North African descent – during a police chase.

And yet the Paris police prefect Laurent Nunez has repeatedly denied that French police are systematically racist.

“Yes, it happens that a certain number of police officers use racist language, but you are talking about systemic racism,” Nunez told a Paris city council meeting in July, just a day after telling French media there was no racism in the French police.

While France officially bans the collection of statistics on race and ethnicity, studies have contradicted claims by Nunez and other officials.
Critics say that racism is unfortunately part of the way the French police operate, with racial profiling in identity checks a key element of policing in the French suburbs, where communities of minority backgrounds complain of being neglected.

In a 2017 survey of 5,000 people, France’s civil liberties ombudsman found that 80 percent of people perceived as black or of North African origin said they had been stopped by police in the previous five years, compared to 16 percent of the rest of those surveyed.

French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged the problem of racial profiling in 2020, admitting that “when you have a skin color that is not white, you are stopped much more. You are identified as part of a problem, and that’s intolerable.”

Examples of notorious police violence over the recent years 

• Nahel Merzouk, 17, shot dead by police at a traffic stop on 27 June 2023 in Nanterre. Video showed the teenager being shot at point-blank range while the vehicle was stationary, contradicting the initial police statement.

• Alhoussein Camara, 19, shot dead at a traffic stop in Angouleme on 14 June 2023. The officer was charged with voluntary homicide.

• Cedric Chouviat, 42, motorbike delivery rider who died in Paris in January 2020 after being held in a chokehold by police during a traffic stop.

• Michel Zecler, 41, music producer, was beaten up and racially insulted by white police officers in Paris on 21 November 2020 for not wearing a face mask during the Covid lockdown. The incident was captured on CCTV, and the four officers involved are awaiting trial, charged with assault.

• Theodore Luhaka, 22, was disabled for life after being sodomised with a police baton during a stop and search on 2 February 2017 in Aulnay-sous-Bois. Three officers are to stand trial for willful violence in January 2024.

• Adama Traore, 24, died in police custody after being pinned to the ground by three officers, following a police chase in Beaumont-sur-Oise on 19 July 2016. Experts concluded he had died of heart failure, aggravated by the use of physical restraint. No charges have been brought against the police and his family continues to campaign for justice.

• Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, were both electrocuted in an electricity sub-station in Clichy-sous-Bois after a police chase on 27 October 2005. Their deaths set off three weeks of rioting. Two police officers who had been accused of failing to help the teens were acquitted in 2015.

On 30 June, Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the United Nations human rights office, said Merzouk’s death and the rioting it sparked was “a moment for [France] to seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement”.

But the French Foreign Ministry responded defensively.

“Any accusation of racism or systemic discrimination in the police force in France is totally unfounded,” it said in a statement.

For political reasons and to attract the votes of the wider population, which is slowly swinging to the right, many politicians also feel the need to defend the police against criticism.

In France, experts say there is a long tradition of the police protecting the government but not the public.

Most observers agree the police are not sufficiently trained, arguing there is no doubt that there are problems within the national police, highlighting problems with training, guidelines, and difficulty passing on information to the public.

Despite the lessons that could have been learned from the 2005 riots, the French police did not reform itself.
That has left minority groups facing the worst level of violence by a police force that is hardening its approach in line with the far-right parties, who support a hardline approach to policing.
The use of force has seen the Yellow Vest uprising, nationwide protests against President Macron’s widely unpopular pension reform measures, as well as simple protests against environmental problems.

Critics argue that being shot to death by police at a routine traffic stop is not something that occurs in a civilized society.

This is essentially institutionalized racism, which without government authorization would be considered criminal.