Guillaume Roux, Pacte-CNRS with Aurélien Lignereux, Sciences Po Grenoble, CERDAP2
In March 2019, Mistral, a neighborhood in Grenoble labeled "sensitive", experienced several consecutive nights of rioting. These followed the deaths, on the 2nd of that month, of two young people on scooters, during a chase with the police - and more precisely with the BAC (Brigade Anti-Criminalité; one of the young people lived in the neighborhood, the other was known there).
In this context, police action has been the subject of virulent criticism, first and foremost in Mistral, but also in other working-class districts of Grenoble (which have also been, by ricochet, the scene of clashes between young people and police officers). The pursuit of these young people by BAC officers, under life-threatening conditions, was often deemed illegitimate, if not outrageous - and raised a number of questions about respect for a formal or informal police code.
In addition, as is usually the case in this type of affair, the official police version, relayed by the media or state agents, was called into question - or at least gave rise to the expression of a "demand for truth" and clarification. Vindictive graffiti appeared on local walls, demanding justice, calling for police officers to be transferred elsewhere, and expressing a radical rejection of the institution.
While such a reaction may seem natural - the Mistral case evokes other comparable events, starting with the common parallel drawn with the deaths of Zyed and Bouna in Clichy-sous-Bois - there's nothing obvious about it. For a start, Mistral had never experienced any real riots, unlike other "sensitive" areas of the city. As in other working-class neighborhoods - and perhaps even more so - some of its residents are expressing a demand for policing (linked to the notorious existence of drug trafficking, which is regularly mentioned in the local media).
A survey carried out in recent years has shown that in Mistral, police action, although highly criticized in its modalities, was often deemed legitimate - which is much less true in other parts of the city (again, in the light of our research). Unlike La Villeneuve, for example, we found no evidence of a negative memory of the police, built up over time, as the "enemy" of the neighborhood and its residents (which can be passed down through the generations). Thus, beyond their apparent similarities, the situations of working-class neighborhoods in terms of their relationship with the police present strong contrasts - contrasts that only a field survey can reveal.
Police action as seen and remembered by of local residents
These local situations can largely be understood in terms of the history of police-population relations. In many of Grenoble's working-class neighborhoods, for example, specialized police forces have been involved for a long time (as part of the various schemes tried out over several decades: Structure Légère d'Intervention et de Contrôle, CRS teams, Brigade Spécialisée de Terrain, etc.). These forces are not spontaneously perceived as undesirable: depending on the case and the groups concerned, the opposite may even be true, with residents of certain areas deploring the low police presence and calling for "îlotage".
However, in many of these neighborhoods, over time, the police have become associated with practices or interventions that have left a negative mark on people's minds, and have crystallized an antagonism between the population and the police. Depending on the case (individuals or neighborhoods), this conflict refers more or less to the brutality of "police raids", to the way in which street patrols are used to monitor a neighborhood and a suspicious population, and to police controls that are "biased" or discriminatory (these different grievances can be combined, but can also be raised separately).
From this point of view, the targeting of certain neighborhoods by the police generates a rejection that can be long-lasting. The reasons for this are partly practical, with some residents citing brutality and sometimes fear of the police and their interventions (for themselves or their children). But they are also symbolic: voluntarily or not, the police send signals that concern both police intentionality regarding a neighborhood or its members, as well as their status - that of a group seen as respectable or more problematic (and which may feel scorned).
Police action can thus redouble, at ground level, the stigmatization that affects the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods, and especially members of racialized minorities. Although not limited to this dimension alone, our work has shown that the interpretation of police targeting by members of neighborhoods labeled "sensitive" - and the very fact of feeling targeted as a member of a "suspicious group" - largely depends on whether residents are identified as white or non-white.
In Mistral, the implementation of a police targeting system (allocation of a specialized brigade, increased number of interventions...) is relatively recent: it follows the classification of this district, along with a few others in the agglomeration, as a Priority Security Zone, which occurred in 2013 (but its repercussions on policing in the district were not immediate). If the principle of police targeting had not previously been massively contested, will the events of March 2019 change the situation? There are now liabilities, which the police can decide to take into account or not. This applies both to the form of its interventions and to the place given to requests from local players or residents who express themselves publicly (and sometimes complain of not being heard). For all the others, only a field survey is able to account for the diversity of grievances, to understand not only how police actions pose concrete problems (when residents feel endangered) - but also how police targeting is symbolically interpreted.
The MéMim project
The MéMim research project, which brings together specialists from various disciplines (historians, political scientists, geographers...), aims to understand how population-police how population-police antagonism develops in different working-class and how it might be resolved. The starting point is an observation, that these disputes are always part of specific local configurations, historically specific local configurations, historically contingent on the scale of a on a neighborhood scale. The aim of the project is to understand how these the way in which these configurations have gradually taken shape. This is at the crossroads of the definition of neighbourhood targeting - which depends on police decisions, local or national local or national action on the part of other public players - and the various events, incidents or tragedies that leave a lasting impression on people's minds, and the reactions of local residents, as seen from the perspective of a from a present-day historical perspective, going back to the 1970s.
Even if this type of questioning comes up against the limits of historical archives and their communicability, comparisons between neighborhoods in the same conurbation seem to us to be already heuristic. Results obtained at this local level shed light on certain findings from national and international studies (opinion polls, etc.) concerning population-police relations (for example, the correlation between expressed distrust of the police, on the one hand, and the frequency of "police raids" in a given neighborhood, on the other). They also make it possible to identify the blind spots in literature, particularly criminological literature, which is not primarily concerned with documenting the existence of local population-police antagonisms - and thus to enter into a dialogue with it.
From the point of view of political science, this work resonates with the relatively recent observation that the role of the police is underestimated in relation to major issues in the discipline. This applies in particular to the way in which members of working-class neighborhoods (or of an underclass) and/or racialized minorities envisage their relationship to public action and society (which ties in with work on policy feedback, citizenship, racialization or processes of collective categorization/identification). From a historiographical point of view, this project is part of a trend which, having focused on the knowledge and know-how, cultures and practices of those involved in policing, is now in a position to account for the reconfiguration of relations between police and populations, as well as the interactions at work in the field. In terms of geography, we can ask how police action contributes to the salience of the "neighborhood" as a physical, but also symbolic, boundary - a principle of classification and social division.
Beyond disciplinary boundaries, this project is part of an effort is part of an effort to reassess the role of the police in the construction the construction of the main socio-political cleavages and antagonisms social life. It also ties in with a body of work on the the production of deviance and norms - and more specifically of groups as "at risk" - based on the practices and mechanisms of public of public action on a local scale. Starting from the observation that the police has "the capacity to constitute reality as the object of governmental rationality" (Paolo Napoli) (Paolo Napoli), we can re-evaluate the production of both police and political (or governmental, in the Foucauldian sense) of the principles of classification and and division of the social world, as they are constructed as close as possible to local local practices and arrangements.