French cops use racial profiling for stop and search
Profiling Minorities: A Study of Stop-and-Search Practices in Paris (PDF) (Thanks, Chris!)
In France, there's no provision for monitoring ethnicity under the law. This is not an altogether bad thing, but it makes it impossible for anyone to get data about police 'ethnic profiling' [what us Brits call 'racial discrimination'] in the way that they treat members of visible minorities.With no official data to go on, and no official co-operation, French researchers surreptitiously staked out areas of heavy police presence, and then noted the ethnicity of people stopped, before approaching them and conducting their own follow-up interviews. Their methodology needed to be pretty robust to make sure that this rather innovative way of collecting data did not bias the sample.
The results are pretty conclusive: even allowing for the nature of the population in the public space, if you are of Black appearance, you are more than six times more likely to be stopped than in you look White. People who look like Arabs are more than seven times more likely than Whites to be stopped.
What's to be done? The report makes a number of practical suggestions.
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Let's pretend I just posted an offensive tirade about how that is not at all racist because minorities are dangerous.
There. Now nobody else has to do that. With that out of the way, the French do have a justification. There was that "Civil Unrest" a while ago weren't there? And that "Civil Unrest" had no cause whatsoever. Certainly discrimination had nothing to do with it. Nope.
Someone needs to remind the French government and the Gendarmes how many Jews were saved from the Nazis by shoddy paperwork by the French, as a refusal by some brave souls to do that era's racial profiling.
/What the hell is wrong with the world?
When I lived in France 15 years ago this was common and well known. The cops would park themselves at major entrances/exits to the social projects and stop any car with a dark face in it. This isn't illegal in France, it's just what you do, like tailgating, strikes, and baguette, a part of French life.
Of course it would cause a major civil rights freakout here. My friend the police inspector was mystified by this.
I'd dislike theirony of having to do your own racial profiling to do this research, if videoing and interogating the gendarmes wasn't such a brave thing to do. Good show.
The implication of racial profiling is that statistically, terrorists operating against "Western Governments" and similar are of Middle Eastern or African descent. Since statistical analysis is now such an important part of every day life, it's impossible to ignore statistics that show a continuous trend.
Thought experiment, put 100 people of equal distribution of ethnic groups etc who all read BoingBoing.net. Now select ten at random. Search them, detain them and make them miss their train. They all come home that evening, annoyed and eager to vent when they see this particular post and post about how it's a violation of their rights. Which it is.
Now, the next day take a 100 different people of equal ethnic disparity who also ALL read this website who are also detained and irritated. Repeat this process for a month.
Now, statistically after a month, *at least* 10% of people who read BoingBoing are noted as being particularly vocal in their opposition of stop and search etc. As a result, the profile of the BoingBoing reader (i.e. someone who loves tech, freedom, unicorns and is wearing a red cape/bloggles combination) becomes a high probability of being opposed to the government and thus a terrorist.
This of course proves nothing. But there is a trend which has some worrying associations. And since everyone puts such faith in statistics, even those who oppose stop and search claim that less than 1% of searches yield any useful information or convictions, the statistics must therefore prove something. And so the persecution of a minority begins anew.
Or we could potentially give up this ridiculous exercise in trying to mathematically apply some arbitrary results to humans who are by definition of our free will, something that constantly goes against apparently observed trends. It's written into us. It's why I'm writing this on a computer to be sent around the world for strangers to read, rather than communicating it only within my small pack that shares the cave in the forest that we live in.
Because we go against the grain.
I always thought this was the CRS's actual job: roam around in groups of five or six, look menacing and hassle the Beurs. Sort of like how the SPG used to be in London. It's not like they stop actual crime. Still, it's good that this study now has actual numbers to put behind something people generally assumed.
PAULR:
Sadly, for every French person that botched paperwork or hid a Jew, there were ten others who happily sent them off two the camps. A large number also thought that Petain was saving the country from Jews and Communists. Most of the resistance cells that were captured by the Gestapo were usually sold out by other French people. This is something that the French still don't like to discuss.
Its funny how people seem to "discover" things now and then. Im french, and let me tell you cops here havec ALWAYS used ethnic profiling to perform id checks on individuals. Its has become a norm, almost common sense, that when you are young, black or arab, you WILL be stopped and searched if you hang around an important subway staion for example.
This is outrageous, i agree. It has been since the first sons of immigrants got harassed by the police when our dear "cités" were just slums and humanitarian disasters.
The riots Ghede talks about fit exactly in this context. Back in March 2005, all the world talked about were these riots. All we talked about in France was how CNN and Fox misplaced our majors cities on the European maps they aired.
My point is that we usually face problems when they slap us in the face. The riots passed, lots of promises were made, but none of them were held. Some cities in the suburbs don't even have a movie theatre or a decent library, 3 years later.
Ill conclude with an experience of my own:
As we were going to our homes after a party, and friend and i got ID check by some undercover cops. There was no actual reason for this check, besides that it was 1am and i guess this was suspicious enough. The roughed us up a little bit (verbally) just like they always do. Then they said to my friend: "Si je pouvais, je t'en foutrais bien une dans la tête à toi..." "I'd put you one in your head if i could..."
Oh yeah , my friend was of arab origins, and im european looking. His papers show that he is french, just like me. But i guess thats not enough.
"There. Now nobody else has to do that. With that out of the way, the French do have a justification. There was that "Civil Unrest" a while ago weren't there? And that "Civil Unrest" had no cause whatsoever. Certainly discrimination had nothing to do with it. Nope."
Did it? My impression of the Civil Unrests was that it was not primarily about discrimination but whatever.
I'd like to think that the cops themselves might not even be aware that they are doing it. I remember a study of a research committee being tasked to evaluate applications. Applications that were very good were judged independent of gender, but mediocre applications there was a difference. That difference was that the judges asked more questions for the female candidate. Each question perfectly sensible. The exact same question might have been asked about the male candidate, but overall the judges just came up with more of them.
The only way against this is to consciously counter this effect. To make clear that while for various reasons race does correlate with criminality, the damage done by racial profiling is much greater and more profound than the marginal improvement in security, for all the reasons already outlined.
"I'd like to think that the cops themselves might not even be aware that they are doing it."
Exactly.
Taking into account the two lessons on "sceptical thinking" we've had on bb this week... :-B
So these researchers set out to test a thesis - that an undue number of 'racial' stereotypes were being stopped by police.
OK. I don't disagree that they found the evidence they were looking for.
BUT, to be scientific about this -
What findings would have DISPROVED this thesis?
Is it falsifiable?
Well, yes.
If they had found that an equal number of little old ladies, schoolchildren, accountants in business suits, passing workmen and courting couples had also been accosted in the same way in the same period. In ratios correlating exactly with the population of the streets at their sample points.
That would have meant that the police were doing their job in an entirely unbiased way. Yay?
So ... it would have been fairer or better for cops to be spending their time on people who don't fit any danger profile at all? Only then can they be free from charges of "profiling"? Unbiased? or just ineffective?
If 80% of reported pickpocket cases describe gypsy-looking kids, then a cop on the lookout for pickpockets should be keeping an eye on gypsy-looking kids, not middle-aged businessmen!
Heck, part of the reason that otherwise upstanding, harmless students, journalists and moms get hassled at your TSA checkpoints is just to keep up the numbers because the inspectors are artificially required to ignore the statistical truths of profiling. The only way they can lean on suspects is if they also lean on a larger number of totally-bogus-non-suspects.
Fine, stereotypes suck. But so does deliberately refusing to learn from blatant observational evidence.
Am I the only one who ever heard of a youth group called "Tecktonic"? Do they profile people after wearing "bright shirts and tight pants" now?
"I'd like to think that the cops themselves might not even be aware that they are doing it."
That's not an excuse. If you only stop people when you have legitimate probable cause, then you won't have this problem.
"So ... it would have been fairer or better for cops to be spending their time on people who don't fit any danger profile at all? Only then can they be free from charges of "profiling"? Unbiased? or just ineffective?"
NO no no no no no no no no no no no no it wouldn't. This pissing argument is wheeled out every time racial profiling is discussed.
Your skin colour or dress is not a good enough reason to stop and search.
This is what leads to rioting, when people are sick of constantly being wrongly viewed as a possible criminal every single day because of their ethnicity.
Sorry BB, this makes me so angry.
Well, I prefer open and goold old honest discrimination than being discriminated against AND lied to.
I'm a white guy, but I had to travel to the USA a lot on business after the 9/11 mania. "Sir, you have been RANDOMLY chosen for an extra level of security checking, please step this way."
Erm, and that happened before every single flight. If that's randomness, I should be winning the euro millions every dang week!
@Felix Mitchell
Fine, so if we can keep the emotives out of this discussion -
What results from their survey would you like to see that would have disproved the theory?
A theory that doesn't admit to a way in which it could be disproved is not scientific.
What would the same survey taken on an unbiased police force look like?
Buahaha... "I'm a white guy, BUT I had to..."
That should definitely read AND, not BUT :-) No offence meant :-)
Effective forms of criminal profiling should not violate the inalienable rights of a countries citizens, nor their human rights as defined by the UN. Beyond that, profiling seems at face value to be an effective tool in combating crime. I would love to see if anyone has anything more than anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
#16 Matt Joyce
Seeing as it's, er, racist, and makes people very angry and distrustful of the police wouldn't it make more sense to ask for more than anecdotal evidence for it?
Quelle surprise.
It's not news, but it's good that someone did the report.
MATTZ:
"The implication of racial profiling is that statistically, terrorists operating against "Western Governments" and similar are of Middle Eastern or African descent. Since statistical analysis is now such an important part of every day life, it's impossible to ignore statistics that show a continuous trend."
I wonder how many terrorists and law-abiding but generally distrustful citizens are created by alienating and dehumanizing behaviour exacted by gendarmes or any other police force that use profiling. Even if a person agrees terrorism is wrong, it's harder to create a climate for terrorism when people feel like they have no reason to feel like they are outside of mainstream society.
As someone who comes from a law-abiding family, that continuously gets profiled at the border, at work, walking down the street, on the lawn of her family's home, opening the door to her own apartment, I saw it is possible to ignore statistics when it comes to treating people properly. My father, who made his living as a statistician said one of his favourite quotations was, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
PIERS
Race isn't the issue. Race plays into it certainly. But it's culture ultimately.
You see a black guy in a suit walking down the street with a briefcase talking on his blackberry, you don't think "zomg gangbanger" or "wtf terrorist". But, you see a black guy with his pants around his ankles, half an afro, sipping a bum soda and rocking out obnoxiously to the worlds worst rap, you start thinking "well shit, is he going to shoot me for being white/red/blue? maybe I am wearing his gangs colors...".
Cultural profiling is pretty much tied to terrorism in most cases, since terrorism tends to originate in culture clash.
The British for instance, looked at the Irish for possible terrorists, because most of the IRA wasn't Polish. And, most of the Irish aren't black ( sorry black irish, not black enough).
Similarly most Islamic terrorists originate from the middle east and are arabic, culturally and racially. So you see an arab in a suit, walking down the street chatting on his blackberry... do you think "zomg terrorist?" Odds are no, unless you are a crazy person. But, you see a squirrely looking Egyptian guy in sandals with an overly large cotton shirt, sweating profusely and whispering to himself... odds are you are going to put some serious concrete between yourself and him.
That's not so much racism as situational awareness. Choosing to acknowledge that there are cultural ties to race, and terrorism isn't built upon any ideas of racial superiority/inferiority. It's built upon facts. And it is in no way an issue of oppression so long as it does not violate the inalienable/human rights of anyone.
Wow, that sure comes as news to anyone who has ever lived in France.
When NATO was bombing Serbia, the French government announced that "Plan Vigipirate Renforcée" was in effect ('vigipirate' is a kind of mini state of emergency for terrorism, when they seal up all the trash cans and deploy soldiers in the Metro, so 'vp renforcée' is the same only more so). The first day it kicked in, I saw a CRS man doing a stop-and-search on a kid in the metro and had to fight the urge to tap him on the shoulder and tell him "I'm not sure what exactly Serbs look like, but I'm pretty sure they're not big black dudes."
Wouldn't racial profiling also be an exploitable strategy, even if it meets some threshold of statistical efficiency?
@dman: The claim this study makes is that relative to their presence in the area, people of African and Middle Eastern descent are stopped disproportionately often.
The "theory" that these police discriminate based on race would have been disproved if researchers had observed police stopping a number of each racial group approximately proportionate to their presence in the area. That is, if the total area surveyed consisted of 500 white people and 500 black people and the police stopped 100 people, you'd expect about 50 of them to be white and 50 to be black. Margin of error of course, but their results were more on the order of 17 white vs. 83 black, which is pretty conclusive.
That's a very falsifiable study, and there are definitely places in the world where a study of the police force would yield a result of "unbiased", or at least "inconclusive". Unfortunately, it's not the case in France.
This is problematic because it conversely means that white, asian, etc. people are stopped much less than usual, which means the security establishment has created its own vulnerability which can be exploited by criminals. For example, want to run drugs? Just get a white courier. Want to steal a car? Make sure a white person drives it away. Not only is racial profiling unethical and horrible community policing, it's ineffective and lazy from a security perspective.
I say we build automated systems that simply taze on sight all squirrely looking arabic types.
You know what the worst of it all is? First, it's that I'm not sure whether that is funny or not; and second, it's that I'm not sure how long it'll take a place like Britain to implement the pilot project.
Also, the police are not supposed to be using racial profiling- as the article points out, the French state is not supposed to recognize racial, ethnic or religious difference. As the culmination of Enlightenment principles, the French republic was meant to be entirely egalitarian. This is why inquiries into a person's parentage were made illegal under Napoleon (also to break the monopoly of the aristocracy over civil service, education and the officer corps).
Of course, everyone knows that this only goes so far in modern France. This study simply affirms that.
In other news, apparently Sarkozy now wants to ban the burqa in public. Slipping a bit in the polls, Nicholas?
This is an improvement for the French Police: on October 17, 1961, in Paris, they used "racial profiling" to round up 11,000 Arabs to detain most of them for a week at various stadia. They shot some to death (only acknowledging two), and drowned between 70 and 200 who were thrown into the Seine off the Pont St. Michel and other bridges.
I'm with the above....this is apparently shocking news to anybody EXCEPT anyone who has ever lived in France.
It's not right...but it's not news.
I dont think this is a clever use of statistics. I think anyone with half a brain could list 10 reasons why this is the case, and a statistician 100
ANWAYA,
Yes, another thing no-one in France really likes to talk about.
The real importance of this study is that now that there are numbers behind this, it can be discussed openly in public and in the press. As many have pointed out (including myself), this was something everyone already knew. No-one needs to ask if policing is racist, in the same way that no-one needs to ask why the son of a Hungarian aristocrat can be president, while Karim or Mustapha from Aubervilliers (whose grandfather might have been a French colonial subject) are not considered "really French." However, the supposed egalitarianism of the state provides a polite fiction that keeps many of these debates out of mainstream political discourse.
Perhaps the real question being asked here should be "Why is ANYONE who hasn't done anything being stopped by police?" I thought their job was simply to enforce the law.
@ANWAYA: The police chief at the time of the 1961 massacre was Maurice Papon, who was convicted in 1988 for handing over French Jews to the Nazis during WWII. The prosecutors, while eager to charge him with WWII-era crimes, were careful to avoid any mention of "la bataille de Paris" (which officially never happened) and only the left-wing press had the poor taste to suggest that someone needed to explain how a Vichy-era collaborator could hold a senior government post and be awarded the Legion d'Honneur.
@zikzak,
I totally know how it could be falsifiable. It's just that doing so produces a stranger situation.
The test is falsifiable, but only in an alternate universe where no cop has any preconception of what a criminal is.
- I say that if cops were required to go out of their way to ensure a perfect balance in the minorities they approach, (by age, sex, dress as well as race or nationality) then you'd get even more false positives, more invasions of privacy without just cause, and even less efficient police work.
I posit that in order for the cops to hit that everyone-is-equally-guilty 50/50 utopia mark, they would have to make up the numbers they got by going after young dark boys by hassling old white ladies.
I don't see that as a better place to be.
If (big IF), in that precinct, crime by one portion of the population is disproportionately higher than average, then that portion of population should be suspected proportionately more by law enforcement. Following the numbers is not racist if it's fact. Denying real numbers based on 'moral' feelings is not just ignorant, it's harmful.
I see a certain sense behind both sides of this upsetting matter: race shouldn't ever be a factor of any kind, and at the same time race often is a factor of a very immediately crucial kind.
Police and citizens both get treated unjustly on the basis of the ill-doings of a small minority of their group. The honest and sincerely dedicated cops who take great personal risk to protect and serve are often unfairly treated or thought of because of a few bad apples-- or even because of bad policies that exist. Many citizens who are simply going about their law-abiding business are unfairly treated or thought of because a few other citizens behaved criminally-- or because they belong to groups who have some threatening practices.
Making assumptions about anyone generally tends to lead to unfairness. Unfortunately, when riots, violence and destruction are involved the stakes are high enough that fairness is often devalued.
@24, 26: +1
If a guy from French Africa moved to America, he'd feel like an American within a year. If the same guy moved to France, he'd never be French.
"Importing a North American Tradition!"
Want some Freedom Fries with that?
Wow, what a piece of non news...
The Frenchies may have learned profiling from us 'Mericans, Billy Blight, but what of it? It's not profiling per se, it's unlawful discriminatory profiling that's at issue. And the French never needed anybody's help in being racist, xenophobic, etc.
Thanks for the lesson in Sociology from Americans and Brits who have perfected these methods from the dawn of their existence...
It might come to a shock to some of you, but in France we are very aware of these methods and have come to live with them. Just as Peeps in the US have as well... If you're black in the US you are very much up for racial profiling, or even better... the cops will just shoot you 41 times... (Amadou Diallo, anyone?)
Or perhaps racial profiling in the UK is different, they have not mastered it yet, they confuse Asians with Brazilians, but in any case the Brazilian will just be shot in the head 7 times!!!
So, anyone trying to give lessons here, you better be from some remote tribe in the Amazon...
The implication of racial profiling is that statistically, terrorists operating against "Western Governments" and similar are of Middle Eastern or African descent.
Which is a poor assumption. Statistically, terrorists operating against the US government are likely to be of European ethnicity (WUO, NWLF, Timothy McVeigh) or Puerto Rican (FALN). In the UK, they would be Irish (IRA, IRSP). In other parts of Europe, the RAF and Brigate Rossi were mostly locals. This is assuming that statistics don't have a selection bias that only includes the period after 9/11/2001 or some other media-worthy date.
@dman: There's a few problems with the reasoning that groups should be profiled according to how much crime their group is responsible for. The first is pretty obvious: how do you define groups? Surely if arabs should be profiled based on the crime rate of arabs, so should people who drive pickups, or people who wear hoodies, or poor people, or members of certain political parties, right? If you want to get all mathematic, there's a lot more to a person's statistical likelihood to commit crime than skin color. And it's simply impossible for a cop to put even the most significant of those factors together into an even remotely reliable probability for a given person. Instead, police seem to be singling out race as a tool for deciding who to stop and who to overlook. The simplest explanation is that they are not applying a statistical analysis, but are simply acting on racial prejudice.
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt, though. Maybe they are stopping arabs because they have a higher average rate of crime. For that to be a legitimate explanation, crime by arabs would have to be 7 TIMES that of whites. I don't know the actual rates, and I'm not even going to bother looking them up, because it's obvious it's nowhere near that.
Add to that the complication that obviously a group which is subjected to 7 times the police harassment is going to end up having more criminals caught. In a theoretical scenario where there are equal numbers of white and arab criminals, stopping arabs 7 times more often would likely result in approximately 7 times as many arab criminals being caught as whites, which itself could be seen as a justification to profile arabs, which would lead to even higher apparent rates of arab crime, etc.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but is there anywhere on the planet where the cops don't do this? The occupation is somewhat famous for racism after all.
We live in a western society that has implicit associations... thats a fact
Now, does it mean that dark skinned people should be targeted? Of course not... but as long as they are portrayed AND portray themselves in our society (ex: assimilation of hiphop, gangsta with black people) thats how things are going to be.
if you are not convinced, please take the IAT racial test from Harvard, that proves that anyone, even Black people, assimilate negative associations with African Americans. No matter how liberal and neutral you say you are...
Very well explained in "Blink" by Gladwell
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/
Boba Fett Diop @ 6:
Yeah, I know, a better response would have been Bulgaria's: "F**k you! These are our citizens, and they have the same rights as anyone else."
And that's why the Nazis bulldozed that country.
Matt Joyce @20, if you want to convince people that you're not motivated by racism, or that "cultural profiling" isn't just a fancy synonym for old-fashioned racist bigotry, you need to be doing pretty much the opposite of what you just did in that comment.
ps. 'Arab' isn't a race--they are considered Caucasians. Lots of blonde and blue eyed Arabs wouldn't fit the profile that our stereotypically ignorant brethren see in their head.
"teen wearing hoodie" (just two factors) tells a reliably different story than "old woman dressed like a nun". In my universe. If the cop didn't suspect the teen at least 7 times more of being involved in the spraypainting of shopfronts, he'd not be doing his job.
"Singling out", no.
Despite the headline, If you see the actual report you'll find that race was only the fourth indicator found to be statistically significant (and that the investigators chose to measure).
Age, dress sense and sex were more important than race in the numbers.
Maybe those police are ageist, sexist, fashion snobs, and racist. In that order.
According to their numbers a white kid dressed 'ghetto' was more of a target than a dark kid dressed tidy.
The real headline should have been "police target young males that dress like gangstas (and many of them are dark-skinned also!)"
Wander slowly around outside the Gare du Nord a few evenings, and make a note of the appearance of the guys that try to sell you drugs. If you don't end up with a results that are 90% skewed in one direction I'd be surprised. So it follows that if the cops wanted to bust the dealers, they should spend 90% of their time on that 10% of the population that match that description. It's "unfair" on on the other non-druggie members of that 10%, but at least it gets real results rather than bugging the obvious non-suspects to appear egalitarian.
Again, looking at the numbers, from the stops that they did do - checking identity papers - the cops were three times more likely to find a reason to take it further with a non-euro-looking civilian. That's after the skew for 'racial profiling' was counted out.
Which leads us to the astounding assumption that "foreigners" are more likely to have visa irregularities than "locals".
If you are looking for illegal immigrants - start with the people who look like immigrants! Doing otherwise is ridiculous. Why would it make sense to stop an obviously French local and ask to see her passport when you are trying to find overstayers?
I'm not saying that there isn't a strong racial bias in those results and in that reality. The numbers are strong for it, and it doesn't surprise me.
It's just the numbers game that I'm looking at statistically. The utopian world where there was no correlation between a suspects appearance and their suspicion rating would be a strange one.
Violent crime is mostly committed by men. Violent crime is generally committed by people age 16-24. When the police act on these claims, as they often do, are they profiling and is that wrong?
Police doesn't control you because of the color of your skin, but because of your look: I've got white friends who are twins. Some years ago, one had the average "normal" outfit while the other was in his black metal fad: long hair, group's tshirt etc. Needless to say, policeman control him at least twice as much, probably thinking he was more likely to be into drugs.
Dman:
" Why would it make sense to stop an obviously French local and ask to see her passport when you are trying to find overstayers?"
You are here assuming that 'obviously French' = White. That is the point. Do you think that French citizens who are not white might be a tad annoyed at the way that this assumption goes beyond you to the police of their republic?
By the way, the majority of overstayers in the UK are _white_ - [this is to some extent an artefact of the fact that if you're from a largely-white country, the best way to get in illegally is to arrive on a visa and not go home, whereas the tougher visa restrictions on largely-nonwhite countries mean that the best bet is to smuggle yourself in.]
Why would it make sense to stop an obviously French local and ask to see her passport when you are trying to find overstayers?
Because many of the overstayers in Western Europe are from Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, etc. What makes someone obviously French? Can I live in France permanently if I wear a striped tee shirt and a beret?
How to make your own crime statistics:
- Stop ten people from Group A for every one person from Group B.
- Use every legal and illegal means available to you to find something illegal - drugs, expired visa, etc.
- Find ten violations in Group A for every one violation in Group B.
Effect, meet Cause.
My impression of an "obviously French" person is constructed of the way they dress, the way the behave around authority in their home precint, their fluency in the local language, the tasks they are doing in public etc. And yes, their physical appearance.
When I think of it, I think I am personally familiar with more non-pure-white French citizens than with the strange Aryan assumption you seem to want to project upon me. To extend, that may be because non-pureblood-French are more likely to speak English and engage non-french in social conversation. But that's another can of racial worms.
FWIW, most French citizens I have personally spent social time with were non-Aryan. Does that change your assumptions about my assumptions?
I think there are segments of society that can logically be considered "not a big threat".
To require that segment of society to be hounded to the same extent as the segment of society that can be statistically tagged as "a higher risk of threat" is disingenuous and basically wrong and ineffective.
That's what I'm saying.
Informed profiling is part of responsible police work.
Ill-informed stop-and-search procedures is a greater infraction on civil liberties that ones that actually had statistical just cause.
To add to everthing that has been said (and for one time as a frenchman, I am glad to read accurate comments abour my country, not just some WWII retarded perjudices).
The French police has always been famous for it's rascism, partly because the french "blue world" is vastly composed of young men from the heartland, who often get their first affectation in big cities and are totally unfamiliar with the poor minorities, wich they identifies instantly as a threat.
You also have an other factor, that always surprises American visitors, is that unlike in the US, black minorities don't support each other, there is even a great tension between african origin frenchs and black carribean frenchs, partly because people from the french antilles (oversea department) benefits of better access to jobs in the public function (if you see a black cop in Paris, he is most certainly from Gadaloupe of Martinique), this favoritism is the source of great hate between the two populations.
But over all, one must consider that the methods of the french police evolved a lot under the "reign" of the omni-president Sarkozy.
This man, in his quest for absolute power, changed the once sleepy french police into a greed driven insane counting machine.
Cops are under constant pressure to reach incredibly high "expultions quotas", every illegal migrant is hunter down, without any consideration of his personnal history or respect for the laws of the country. Recently they pushed the insanity to arrest people in the queue for the immigration bureau, migrants trying to obtain legal papers are now treated the same as delinquants.
The policemen who refuse to apply this insane regulations, who prevents them to doing anything else of their jobtime (like arrest criminals, or assist victims) are likely to get fired.
Eight years ago, when Sarkozy was not yet President, but already the interior minister (aka first cop of France), ha was already planning is big scheme for a whithier France : in my hometown of Toulouse, he surprised everybody when in one of his media coup, he fired a whole police station, for the sole mistake of having the habit of playing rugby game in their day off with troube-maker kids. The unfortunate cops were soon to be replaced by his newly created shock troops the "BAC" (anti-delinquence brigade), often refered as Sarko's Pitbulls. A few months later, after many flashball safaris and taser torture, the poor neighboohood of Toulouse bursted in violent riots, as well as the rest of the country.
Sarkozy was too happy to call them "racaille" (scum) and pretend they set their mosquees in fire themselves, only to piss them even more.
A year after he was elected president by a majority of scared ederly french conservatives.
During all this time, CNN was speaking of muslim riots, and depicted Sarkozy a the providential man.
That's silly, I said no such thing.
Semantically true, but the onus of making a point is on the speaker.
I certainly thought you meant "visually french people", because most lazy arguments are made by lazy thinkers, and most racists are lazy thinkers.
(See, you probably think I called you a racist there, but I did not)
ahh petit Nic!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uxb0JHqzlA
"in connection with an unrelated matter"
http://torrentfreak.com/p2p-collection-costs-man-huge-fine-suspended-sentence-090704/