Police Power and Race Riots - Cathy Lisa Schneider

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even when blacks were significantly less likely than whites to show disrespect toward the police. Police stopped whites when they were inebriated, so those stopped behaved less respectfully. They stopped blacks, in contrast, on speculative rather than evidentiary grounds. Blacks were thus far more likely to behave respectfully.51 Police actions, in other words, had nothing to do with the behavior of blacks. Rather police were biased a priori against blacks, and blacks correctly read the situations at hand.

      Racial and ethnic prejudices are embedded in police occupational culture and work, insists Holdaway. Police officers speak in racially derogatory terms even toward their own black and Asian colleagues. Black and Asian officers “must affirm rather than challenge the values of their colleagues…. Black officers find a greater measure of acceptance among colleagues when they demonstrate physical prowess when dealing with an offender.”52 Holdaway illustrates the ways in which police work is embedded in systems of inequality and how police work depends on categorical mapping. Yet he pays insufficient attention to broader political processes. As Robert Reiner points out, British researchers became too close to the police they studied. The result was that they ignored “the wider context of social, political and economic change … concentrating on funded, short scale projects, examining trees while failing to remark on the forest.”53

      French Studies of Riots and Banlieues

      The 2005 riots also sparked a wave of theorizing in France. Most explanations fell into one of two categories. One set of work was based on statistical analysis of the correlates of riots. In a broad comparative study of neighborhoods in which riots broke out and those where they did not, for instance, Hugues Lagrange observed that riots erupted where a high percentage of African immigrants, large families, and youths resided. Africans, he claims, were more likely to have larger families (sometimes although not always due to polygamy), and children from large families tended to do poorly in school (lacking basic skills) and were more likely to engage in criminal and delinquent activities and riots.54

      Fabien Jobard concurs in a series of articles drawn largely from Lagrange’s data.55 Disputing claims made by unnamed American authors, Jobard argues that the French riots were not race riots, like American or British riots, since the rioters did not attack people or stores belonging to other races or ethnic groups (although he admits there were no such stores in the banlieues) or claim to speak on behalf of a race. Instead, he argues, in his analysis of the 208 people tried in Bobigny for rioting, that while polygamous families were rare (3 percent of case files),

      [t]he average size of the families to which they belonged was typically very large: the average number of brothers and sisters was actually 4.6, while as many as one-fifth of the relevant families contained seven or more children. A family size of this kind is indicative of the presence of a large number of families from sub-Saharan Africa—a feature of French life highlighted by correlations produced by Lagrange. The geographical locations of the riots, especially in the west of France, are also closely aligned to major settlements of the new sub-Saharan migrants (and, indeed, such locations are characterized by the concentration of large families).56

      Concentrating their efforts on preventing the riots from spreading, Jobard insists, police in 2005 failed to crack down on rioters, allowing youths to remain “free to continue their activities unhindered in smaller territories surrounded by police forces.”57 In 2005, Jobard argued that there was no evidence that French police were racially biased when they stopped “a given individual or group of individuals regardless of the signs of racism that may be observed here and there.”58 In a later study, however, conducted with René Lévy in collobaration with John Lamberth and Rachel Nield from the Open Society Foundation, they found significant racial disparities in the frequency with which police stopped pedestrians. Researchers recorded police stops at several metro stations outside shopping areas downtown. They found that police stopped Arab youths 7.8 times and black youths 6.0 times more often than they did white youths.59 Jobard and Lévy were careful to point out, however, that style of dress was a better predictor of being stopped than ethnicity alone. Police responded to the study by insisting that young people coming in from the banlieues, dressed in the style of ghetto youth, were more likely to shoplift (although they provided no evidence to support this claim). Since there had been no studies to dispute (or support) the police officers’ claims, and Jobard and Lévy had studied only shopping centers, the widely publicized study did not change policy makers’ perspectives on police reform. More critically, the study underestimated the degree of racial profiling by failing to record stops in banlieues: neighborhoods virtually occupied by police, with few stores or shopping areas.

      The second set of studies was based on ethnographic research in the banlieues. The work of Didier Lapeyronnie, for instance, demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of this methodological approach. On the one hand, through years of work with neighborhood youths, Lapeyronnie discovered that police violence and racial discrimination caused more anger and frustration among banlieue youths than poverty or unemployment. In a 2006 article in Déviance et société he argues that riots were a form of collective action, sparked by police violence and a perception of conflict between us and them:

      This common negative experience generates an “us” which manifests itself in opposition to the police, indeed permanent conflict with them. The “we” thus negatively constituted by hostility toward the police is not devoid of significance…. In activating the “us” and forcing the change of the legitimacy of the imperative frameworks, the incident also renders the revolt both expected and legitimate…. The death of young people at the site of police interventions always elicits strong individual and collective emotion and crystallizes the feeling of “us,” victims of injustice, in opposition to a “them,” an unjust police force.60

      On the other hand, like many ethnographers, Lapeyronnie reifies space and place, projecting motives and character faults to an entire neighborhood. He exaggerates the isolation of neighborhood residents and describes their lives as if they ended at the neighborhood edge. As such, he narrows his sites on a microcosm of dysfunctional interpersonal relationships, cultures, and behaviors. Much like the works of others who have looked at the “culture of poverty,” Lapeyronnie’s study is reminiscent of the Chicago school—a view of the city as a “mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate,”61 where “the primary [source] of social integration and order”62 is the geographic community and poorly integrated neighborhoods foster an array of bad behaviors. In 2001 Lapeyronnie attributed riots to maladjustment: “Discomfort and self-doubt become a permanent condition and often end in self-destruction. Alcohol, drugs, and narcotics consumption are only the most banal forms. Riots, ‘rodeos’ and excessively risky behavior, and finally excessive TV viewing are all part of such self-destructive behavior” (emphasis mine).63

      Despite the fact that his 2006 article seems to be a relational analysis of riots as forms of collective action provoked by police violence, Lapeyronnie fails to trace these dynamics either in the conclusion to the article or in his 2008 book.64 Instead he returns to the same neofunctionalist analysis that dominates his earlier work: residents of the banlieues appear to have a singular set of emotional and mental processes.65 He says,

      Through the emotion that is felt, the individual directly demonstrates his attachment to the “us” and the solidarity which connects him to those who share the same feeling, the same mindset. For a moment, he distances himself from the triviality of his own reality in order to submit himself to a “force” completely outside of himself. Because of the riot, the affirmation of “self” melts into the affirmation of “we.” The individual charges himself with an energy which allows him to move to action, a sort of electricity, says Durkheim, an “emotional energy” which is also moral for him since it is strongly linked to the attachment to life or to respect.66

      But residents of large urban areas do not all know each other or share similar characteristics. The reification of such spaces deflects attention from the real “relationship of controller and controlled,” as Robert Sack cogently notes.67 In contrast to those who see conflicts between police and minorities as the results of dysfunctional

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