Difficult not to have some sympathy for the rioters in France
Merry Vole
Shipmate
in Epiphanies
Nahel M, aged 17, was shot dead at point blank range, in the chest, by a police officer at a 'traffic stop'. last Tuesday in Nanterre, Paris.
Discussing with Mrs Vole she thinks the violent rioting is not justified. Certainly the attack on the house and and family of a mayor is totally deplorable.
BUT.. is setting fire to things the only way the authorities will actually change police strategy so this sort of horrific incident is much less likely to happen again?
Today's BBC report:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66084677
Discussing with Mrs Vole she thinks the violent rioting is not justified. Certainly the attack on the house and and family of a mayor is totally deplorable.
BUT.. is setting fire to things the only way the authorities will actually change police strategy so this sort of horrific incident is much less likely to happen again?
Today's BBC report:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66084677
Comments
What did Martin Luther King Jr say about riots?
There's what he said, and what people think he said. This article provides some background...https://fee.org/articles/george-floyd-and-what-martin-luther-king-jr-really-said-about-riots-and-the-language-of-the-unheard/
Doublethink, Admin
If this happens in a relaxed middle class town like Aix, what must it be like in a big city.
This sort of thing just grinds people down until a touch paper is lit.
Judging by the reports on the BBC news the French authorities are in complete denial about it.
Very interesting article. Here's a quote from it's author, Kai M Wright:
"Looting and rioting, no matter the source, must be condemned so that we may reach those who need to be reached, to bring about the changes we seek."
The extreme right are working hard on getting the police unions on their side. The extreme left are using it to undermine Macron without actually coming up with any concrete plans about how they'd change anything. Some of the young people setting fire to stuff know why they're doing it, but many don't.
Meanwhile the people suffering the most are other people of colour in disadvantaged neighbourhoods who no longer have a bus to take them to work.
But maybe something simple like police having to wear bodycams would make such shootings less likely?
That's just a touch naïve isn't it? If we could do that without looting and rioting, it never would have come to looting and rioting.
Yet violence is also a pretty much inevitable consequence of oppression.
When people aren't listened to no matter how loudly they shout .......
My bold.
I'm sure MLK did not wish to see violence being used. However, if anyone says *rioting is the language of the unheard* (or words to that effect), they are correct - which in itself may not justify the violence.
That said, what's left?
BTW, I'm not sure that those of us who don't live in France are up to speed with the feeling in that country. My sister lives near Narbonne, and usually (albeit rather grudgingly) supports M Macron, but I haven't spoken to her recently to get her opinion. She, like pretty well all my family, is a liberal left-winger (woke, I suppose...).
We seem to have moved onto the American experience here. This thread is about France and it would be great if people have links that help us hear the voices of French minorities. Please could people post US stuff on the new thread?
Edited to add - I 've cut and pasted your cross post to the new thread @ohher - it just missed the split :-)
Thanks
Louise
Epiphanies Host
I went for a haircut yesterday, as you do. As is very often the case in Paris, all the people working in the salon were of Moroccan descent. I found it interesting to see that they had almost no sympathy for the rioters. There was no doubt in their minds that these people were just there to steal and destroy stuff and that the riots had nothing to do with any kind of peaceful protest. They blamed the parents.
I don't feel all that qualified to judge whether they're right about that. But ISTM it is important to realise that North African immigrants are not a homogeneous bloc. After all, when the rioters set someone's car on fire, the owner is usually another person of Arab or black descent.
People riot because the people who "need to be reached" aren't allowing themselves to be reached. Usually, riots break out after more peaceful means have been attempted, repeatedly.
No idea who Kai M Wright is or why he's qualified to compete with Dr King.
Have you any evidence that the sentence I've bolded is actually true ?
(That's not a snarky question, BTW).
My bad.
They are not as passive a people (or should it be supine?) as the English.
There was rioting in Perpignan when I was visiting my sister some 18 years ago (it was not my presence that sparked the violence), which IIRC was between various ethnic minority groups. The suburbs where the rioting took place were pretty dire, it has to be said, with widespread poverty and deprivation.
That's usually where it comes from. Certainly in MLK's context, people tried asking nicely and did all manner of political engagement for decades.
That said, your question is apt and I'm not qualified to give it a clear thought-out answer. I was a political science major in undergrad (they called it politics,) and one thing I recall from there was that civil unrest generally comes with a sudden change in social expectations. People can be kept in a sustained state of poverty and will put up with a horrifying scale of abuse as long as it's normalized, but once a sign appears that the norm might change, that's when people get agitated. It's the possibility that sets things off.
Twenty years out, I think I'd be more cautious than to say riots are always one or the other. Rioting can appear out of a lot of contexts, driven by a plethora of local motivations. As in recent years in America, you can have multiple factions rioting at the same time, in opposition, each trying to manipulate the situation in their own particular ways.
And for that reason, I still fairly disagree with the claim that riots must be universally censured. You really have to read for context. I'm not French, I'm American. I do, though, understand racism, classism, and segregation as collectively bad things that take collective action to address, and when that action isn't taken I really cannot blame people for getting righteously ticked off.
It may be arrogant, but I think on a social level, humans are humans are there are some experiences that can transcend culture. Collective suffering is one of them. Every particular story has its own particular, but you can see the trend-lines across human history.
Feels like I just cleverly evaded your question, but that's what I got for now. Hope it's constructive.
[and I just now read the host-post, and will reiterate that - not being French - I won't pretend that my blathering is not necessarily salient to that particular situation]
You're welcome.
That said, I'm not inclined to defend the police against the charge that they have considerable numbers of racist officers in the ranks, and frequently use excessive force.
I think la vie en rose is on the money when she says the whole thing is very complicated. But trigger-happy police certainly seem to be an issue. I was surprised to hear how many people were shot dead by French police at check-points last year - a record 13 I think. The equivalent figure for England and Wales was two.
Ok, both figures are very, very low compared with the US and plenty of other non-European countries no doubt. I don't think the figure would be very high for Australia and New Zealand though.
At any rate, judging from the video footage I'd be surprised if this particular officer got away scot-free. That said, his supporters have raised far more funds than Nahel's family have received from well-wishers.
These are long standing problems. There were extensive riots across Parisian suburbs in 2005. This isn't the first time this has happened nor do I think it will be the last.
I wonder if that's because the cop has more donors, or just that they're donating larger sums of money.
I don't know how many individual donors there were.
Apparently, there might have been some legal issues with raising funds to pay for a criminal defense. The lawyer for the dead teen's family had launched legal action against the people running the site.
A smart punch on the nose for the egregious M Zemmour.
The U.S. is such an outlier among developed democracies it's not a useful basis of comparison. Here are the stats on police killings (whether at checkpoints or not) in the various countries mentioned above.
France: 37 (5.5/10 million)
United Kingdom: 3 (0.5/10 million)
Australia: 16 (6.5/10 million)
New Zealand: 1 (2.1/10 million)
United States: 1,096 (33.1/10 million)
As you can see, one of these is not like the others.
Statistical analysis can only get you so far, but that being said, one of France's difficulties in addressing this situation may be based in lack of statistics.
It is impossible to address a problem if you start out with the premise that the problem does not (and cannot) exist.
It boggles my mind to think of people doing so to defend one who is captured on video shooting someone at point blank range through what appeared to be the open window of a car without there being any apparent threat to life and limb.
Sure, I don't doubt that policing is stressful, complex and demanding but shooting someone in cold blood when they aren't armed or posing a threat to officers or members of the public reveals at the very least some major flaws in policy and operation.
There have been cases over the years of police mistakenly shooting someone they thought were armed but there seems no indication of that here.
Whether it will wash with a court remains to be seen.
Well yes, and seeing as it's clear from the footage that the officer was stood to one side and in no danger of being run down then I can't see how it could wash. He might argue, though that there were other police officers or pedestrians off screen who may have been struck or injured as the lad tried to accelerate away but the car had barely begun to move when the fatal shot was fired.
The car did career down the road for a while before coming to a halt and one of the passengers fled the scene, but so far there seems no indication that the vehicle was being used as a weapon.