"Structural mistrust in poor neighborhoods vis-à-vis the police"

In front of the Champigny-sur-Marne police station, this Sunday.

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• A new news item raised Gérald Darmanin and many political leaders on Sunday: around forty people would have sent a firework mortar to the Champigny-sur-Marne police station, near Paris, on the night of saturday to sunday

• If some see it as the new sign of an increase in violence, Sebastian Roché, interviewed by

  20 Minutes

  , sees it as the result of an old distrust of working-class neighborhoods towards the police.

• Nor does he believe in a response to the government's new drug policy: according to him traffickers have absolutely no interest in attracting attention.

Fireworks mortars were sent, during the night from Saturday to Sunday, on the police station of Champigny-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne), near Paris, in front of which stood two smoking agents.

No injuries but around forty people who wanted to attack their "physical integrity", according to the city's DVD mayor Laurent Jeanne.

While several right-wing opposition leaders denounced these attacks on the police this Sunday and demanded a strong reaction from the government, in tune with the Alliance police union, Sebastian Roché, research director at the CNRS, author of

(Grasset), sees in this incident above all a “symbolic, spectacular challenge” and the continuity of forty years of mutual mistrust between the police on the one hand and “neighborhood youth” on the other.

Is it common to see young people from a neighborhood attacking the physical integrity of police officers?

It is difficult to say, there is no precise accounting of these incidents.

There, what strikes me, it is first of all the number of people: 40. I do not know if that will be confirmed, of course it is difficult to pronounce on facts still rather poorly established.

That's a lot 40 people: that means that there is a mobilization of people who are angry or hostile to the police.

Then, it is above all a symbolic challenge.

Because there are no injuries, no deaths.

If we want to kill the police, we can, it's possible to kill people.

If 40 people were determined to kill, there are ways to achieve something like that.

For example, if we were dealing with traffickers, they would have the economic means to buy arms.

There, what I see is above all a symbolic, spectacular challenge, with fireworks rockets, which are fired.

It is an act of defiance, of rejection.

This type of act is part of a long history in France, of almost forty years.

We are not on an epiphenomenon.

Governments treat this each time as one-off problems here or there: no, there is a structural mistrust that has settled in poor neighborhoods vis-à-vis the police.

It is not just a matter of criminal activity, for a simple reason: people who are in criminal activity are the last to want to draw the attention of the police to them.

The criminal economy, which obviously exists, is an economy in which discretion and tranquility are necessary.

Does this mean that when Gérald Darmanin links this attack to his new policy against drug consumption, we can think that he is wrong, that it is not necessarily a local response to this national policy?

Subject to all reservations, with the information we have, that seems extremely unlikely to me.

It is a clever attempt to recover Gérald Darmanin.

Gérald Darmanin's policy is targeted at drug users, not at traffickers.

So they don't really have a reason to answer it.

In addition, traffickers would have no reason to symbolically come into conflict with the police in a given place.

And they don't.

Where there are clashes around traffic with the police, in extremely hot areas, it is not that type of clash: it is police corruption, where in more violent countries, we physically eliminates them, as in Colombia or Mexico.

This is not the configuration that we observe.

There, we have two groups with two social identities.

On the one hand, “young people from the neighborhoods” and on the other the police officers.

And we have a spiral that has started and which is now very well established in France with acts of retaliation, intimidation, on both sides.

We tend to treat them separately but in fact it's a cycle that we observe.

Some put forward the hypothesis of a traffic accident in recent days in the neighborhood, where the police would have a responsibility, which would be the trigger.

Without commenting on the case of Champigny, and if I understand you correctly, is it a more credible type of dynamic in this kind of situation?

We can say yes because what we know: the riots of 2005 started off with a chase that ended with police officers who did not kill people but who did not provide assistance to people they pushed. unintentionally in the transformer.

It's that kind of sequence of events.

The bottom of this sequence is mistrust and hostility.

In France, for forty years, we have been committed to a model whereby the good police are the police who scare.

In Germany, they don't do that.

They have embarked on a path of “de-escalation” in their relationship with poor neighborhoods.

They are committed to a policy of capacity to understand cultural diversity, to take it into account, but also to seek and establish positive relationships with different groups of people who live in these disadvantaged neighborhoods.

This is what in France we do not see the establishment of a policy to overcome mistrust.

And that will not improve alone: ​​we need a proactive multi-year policy.

Since this summer, this type of news item has experienced increased media coverage, the Minister of the Interior reacts strongly to this type of event but therefore, if we listen to you, there is nothing new, just a new light ...

The situation in which Gérald Darmanin finds himself is quite simple: he has no new ideas to implement, he has no means and he has no time.

In two years you cannot transform an organization like the police.

He plays the card he has left: communication.

This is what he is trying to do by trying to focus on moral issues, like "drugs is bad".

Unfortunately, there are no strategies to act on the problem.

But we have a lot of commotion, with well-defined terms.

We are therefore talking more about events that were already there.

Society

Champigny police station attack: A person in custody

Miscellaneous

The Champigny-sur-Marne police station attacked with fireworks mortars

• Society

• Police

• security

• District

• Delinquency