Still, many ethnographers depict the plight of banlieue and minority youths with sensitivity and empathy. David Le Poutre, Stéphanie Beaud, Michel Pialoux, Michel Kokoreff, and Christine Bachman describe a host of serious problems that minority youths in banlieues confront, including poverty, unemployment, poor housing, discrimination, and humiliating encounters with teachers, police, and other state officials. Kokoreff, for instance, writes of the negative, deleterious role played by the police in the banlieues: “The urban police no longer appear as a cause of peace; on the contrary, they arouse fear. The principal tool of the forces of order is the identity check, which systematically heightens tension instead of relieving it.”69
French Studies of Police
Most French specialists on policing articulate an interactive model similar to that of David Waddington. Sophie Body-Gendrot, for instance, rejects studies whose subtext is that “large immigrant families concentrated in public housing estates are, themselves, the source of the problems”70 and yet argues that police “are tired of being humiliated, sneered at and physically attacked by disenfranchised youth.”71 Similarly, Roché describes numerous incidents of police abuse but concludes, “In my view, a police action alone cannot explain a riot. Riots are only the pinnacle of a perennial conflict between particular groups of young men and police…. From one side to the other, insults fly, blows or more are exchanged, and masculine intimidation becomes part of the routine. Relationships are particularly poor with youth of foreign origin. [One study suggests that] youth of North African immigrant backgrounds see the police as a rival gang, as a racist force.”72
Laurent Bonelli, Laurent Mucchielli (at times with Marwan Mohammed or Abderrahim Ait-Omar), Farhad Khosrokhavar, and Didier Fassin have been the sharpest critics of both the politics of crime control and police conduct in poor minority banlieues.73 Bonelli argues that the “culture of results” encourages police to look for crimes rather than prevent them. Perpetual identity checks lead to escalating conflict: “Each victory for one side is a defeat for the other.” When a young boy dies during a police operation or is shot by the police, “the neighbourhood burns.”74 Khosrokhavar points out that Muslim youths are far more likely to be imprisoned than white French for the same behavior or crime.75 Marwan Mohammed and Laurent Mucchielli point out that most riots in France over the past twenty-five years have been confrontations between banlieue youths and police and that police intrusions and violence rank top place among the fears and complaints of minority youths.76 The political elites are largely to blame. They deliberately foster panic during election campaigns and then deploy police against banlieue youths under the guise of controlling crime.77
Didier Fassin’s engrossing and elegant ethnography of the French police stands alone.78 Fassin challenges the Flashpoint paradigm commonly used by French scholars. It is not the actions of minority youths that provoke police violence, he contends, but rather the discourse and actions of French political elites, who have deliberately stoked racial fears and encouraged police to act like occupying armies in poor banlieues:
Among the hundreds of such incidents I witnessed, almost the only ones in which the individuals concerned displayed insolence involved youngsters from middle-class or wealthy backgrounds, particularly students who evidently had no experience of this kind of situation and seemed unaware of the potential consequences of their behavior. Yet in none of these cases—which were anyway quite infrequent, since these groups rarely face such procedures—did the officers seek to escalate the tension in order to provoke a scene that could later be set down as insulting and resisting the police.
Conversely, when checks were carried out in the projects or on the streets of the city, young people, mostly of working-class background and non-European origin, almost always kept a low profile, only speaking when they were asked a question, not reacting to the abusive or racist comments and aggressive or humiliating treatment some officers subjected them to, simply presenting their papers and submitting to the body search. Accustomed to and even blasé about these repeated irritations, knowing quite well what would happen if they protested, they appeared to be waiting until the bad moment passed, silent, expressionless, for the only way not to lose face in this confrontation was not to enter into any transaction with the police.79
Fassin attributes the 2005 riots and nearly every major urban disturbance from Watts to London over the past fifty years to racial profiling and police aggression in “disadvantaged neighborhoods, usually leading to the death of youth belonging to a racial or ethnic minority group.”80
Comparative Studies
There are relatively few systematic cross-national and comparative studies of riots. Three of the strongest such approaches are those of Loïc Wacquant, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Michael Katz.81
Wacquant’s scathing discussion of the link between neoliberalism and mass incarceration and his devastating critique of Chicago school analyses of urban poverty alone make his work worth reading. But his explanation for riots is less convincing. The American riots of the 1960s and the French riots in 2005 were the results of diametrically opposite processes, he insists. American riots were “propelled from outside by the crumbling of the caste system”; French riots were the result of the slow decomposition of working-class neighborhoods from within. The first was caused by “the restructuring of urban capitalism and the policy of social regression of the federal government set against the backdrop of continued ostracization of African Americans,” and the second “by the triangular relationship between the state, social classes and the city.”82
Banlieues, Wacquant claims, are antighettos, places of integration and state intervention. In the United States we have “racial cloistering,” whereas in France the comparable pattern is one of “ethnic dispersion and diversity.”83 “Twenty-five years after the great race riots of 1965–1968, African American neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit have the look of war zones [while] degraded working-class banlieues, renamed ‘sensitive neighborhoods,’ have been the target of a concerted renovation plan under the heading of Neighborhood Social Development.”84
Wacquant’s explanation is unsatisfying. First, he does not explain why different processes in divergent societies led to similar outcomes. If the American riots were provoked by improvements in their environment (the crumbling of the caste system), why did French riots erupt when things were getting worse (the decomposition of working-class neighborhoods)? And why did the decomposition of working-class neighborhoods provoke riots only in France and only in neighborhoods where blacks and Arabs were concentrated? The decomposition of working-class neighborhoods was certainly a more global phenomenon. Wacquant fails to offer a systematic explanation.
Second, Wacquant exaggerates the stability, homogeneity, and isolation of black ghettos in American cities, particularly during the 1960s, which is when most riots occurred. Indeed, as Wacquant has observed, American ghettos were not yet “ethnically and socially homogeneous universe[s] characterized by low organizational density.”85 Many, such as Harlem, were characterized by high density and overcrowding. Others, such as the South Bronx and Brooklyn, were working-class areas in the process of decomposition—although admittedly decomposing far more rapidly than the French banlieues and spurred by different socioeconomic processes (specifically highway expansion, urban renewal, mass exodus of industry, and white flight). The timing of the new migrants was similarly miserable: black and Puerto Rican migrants arrived just as the last factories were closing and blue-collar jobs were exiting the city. Massive changes to the American city were blamed on the new arrivals, giving grist to politicians who promised to protect white citizens with punitive policing measures, much as French politicians did at the turn of the twenty-first century. Indeed both American ghettos and French banlieues, and not, as Wacquant claims, simply the former, were “anchored and aggravated by public