Abstract
Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2013; 287 pp. (including index): 9780745664804
Didier Fassin spent 15 months with the French police, mostly with an anticrime squad that patrols housing projects, ‘les banlieues’. In France about 8 million people (out of a population of 64 million, or one person in eight) live in such housing projects. Most of them are immigrants or ethnic minorities.
So why were special anticrime squads created? (These are small units that operate in a highly autonomous manner.) Fassin dwells not on the riots which have occasionally flared up in these areas, but on politicians capitalizing on the issue of immigration and riots, with ensuing policies of segregation and discrimination, and on using the police as an instrument of social control.
The image of ‘les banlieues’ is sustained and nurtured in several ways: the trope of housing projects as ‘no-go zones’, fostering a sense of danger and the notion that ordinary police do not dare to go there, that instead special forces have to be called in – the anticrime squads. There is an alarmist use of language, including metaphors such as jungle, savages, war, and so on in the media, in political speeches and among the police officers themselves. Not only in speech, as in the use of metaphors, but also in symbols like the various badges worn by the squads, the image of danger is used to enhance and dramatize the profession: a pack of wolves in front of an apartment block, a panther with its claws ripping through a neighborhood, a spider trapping a complex of high buildings in its web. The author contrasts this image of danger with surveys that do not show increased risks compared with other neighborhoods. His own experiences in the neighborhoods and his interviews with ordinary police officers further do not confirm this image.
Contrasts are also made between the image of police work as action-filled and the reality of routine tasks full of waiting, checking small break-ins, false alarms, and long hours of cruising around unproductively. This is presented in the best chapter, ‘The ordinary’, where Fassin lets us follow some ordinary working days. All the waiting and the rather ‘action-free’ days result in boredom, a boredom which is alleviated by creating action, often in the form of stopping and searching black youth. At times this quest for and appreciation of action are described with unintentional humor, bordering on the farcical – as in the slow, ineffectual attempts at investigating a burglary, or in too much intervention too quickly when suspicions are raised, resulting in arrests of helpful witnesses, or in provoking dangerous and unnecessary car chases.
Sometimes these interactions become something of a game in which the police search for and creatively use laws that can be applied, but are not commonly used. The police then share information and anecdotal knowledge of legislation that allow them to make the law, rather than applying it. But such actions are strictly socially regulated and structured. The police may monitor areas where students gather, but in these contexts they do not accuse them of playing their music too loud (as ‘disturbance of the public peace’), nor do they use identity checks or stop-and-search routines; these are saved for the minority youth in the housing projects.
In many chapters the author contrasts his field observations with popular films and purported documentaries on police work, as he observes that these either color the image of police work or reflect an ideal version of it. For instance, in the chapter ‘Interaction’, the author refers to a popular French documentary showing the police arresting a housing project youth. In the documentary the youngster is highly provocative, while the police remain calm. In Fassin's own field work the youth are instead studiously passive, while the police are the ones who possess both legal authority and coercive powers, and this is something the young people are keenly well aware of. They have learnt from their parents and older siblings that they should submit docilely.
In this book we also learn that the police create various categories, as has been shown in many other studies of the police: suspects playing by the rules gain a certain appreciation (this is the category in which the Roma are placed), then there are bastards, hoodlums and honest people, and we hear various epithets indicating race. As has perhaps already been made clear, Fassin argues that discrimination and racism do exist and that they govern, to a large extent, both general policies and police work. He is critical of social scientists that do not acknowledge these mechanisms but hide them by accounting for disproportionate arrests of blacks, Arabs and Roma using various other factors.
The author explains that he wants this book to be popularly accessible, to be written in a clear and simple language. Somehow he fails, however. In spite of dramatic events the book does not ‘grab you’. Perhaps because the field work is presented in long passages of reporting, with the author summarizing events and interactions, instead of presenting them more in the form of field notes with some examples of dialogue, which might have enhanced the reporting and made it come alive. Perhaps the liveliness also suffers as the ethnography is not presented by writing with a present tense. I also missed some more detailed analysis and an exploration of negative cases, of deviations from the common picture. As it is, the text is repetitive at times.
There is no doubt that the book was written from a normative perspective; small wonder, given the author's field experiences – and an indignation that must have reached fever pitch when his own son, calmly waiting for the bus, was the victim in one of those disproportionate deployments of resources: four vehicles, 15 officers, and the use of methods otherwise devoted to riot control. The critique, not only of the police but of a society which breeds such unequal treatment, colors the book, and you may well find the author's questions pertinent: how is it that in a rich country with democratic principles, segregation and discrimination are allowed to flourish to the extent that some categories of citizens become virtually unprotected by the law? And why have the police come to play the role of maintaining a social order based on ethnic distinctions, rather than on keeping general public order?
These issues are compelling and important (in more countries than France), but raising them in the form of a social critique, as here, is not without its problems. For one thing, the reader may well wonder how much the author's analyses are influenced by his moral indignation. To be sure, Fassin knows his social science police studies, and he has done his field work thoroughly – yet you still miss the ‘sociological eye’ which would increase your understanding, excite and surprise you.