Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. By Didier Fassin. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013. 320 pp. $69.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.This fascinating book examines the punitive French police practices that triggered widespread rioting in French cities in 2005. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the time of those rebellions, the analysis reveals how police officers justified their practices and why the people subjected these practices so deeply resented them. The analysis has wide relevance beyond the French context.The author focuses on particular situations, a concept similar in some ways the police-civilian encounter that is the subject of many U.S. studies, but with special attention participants' understanding of is it that's going on here? (p. 148, quoting Goffman). What is going on is intense, ongoing stopping, identity checking, and frisking. Fassin shows that the meaning of these practices amounts deliberate humiliation of young racial minority men that is justified by an understanding of these targets as a foreign and dangerous element. This ongoing humiliation serves enforce these youths' subordination in a hierarchical social order.The police studied by Fassin are mainly young working class white men from small towns assigned the poor racial minority banlieues (suburbs). From politicians' rhetoric and police training they learn that they must use extraordinary measures bring order an alien jungle rife with violent crime. Their official insignias express this targeting: one is a rifle-scope cross-hairs centered on a high-rise public housing project. Ironically, rates of violent crime are down in France as in other industrialized countries, and so the French anticrime squads patrol in boredom, waiting long hours for the rare emergency call. Lacking the need respond crime, they make proactive stops ostensibly aimed at preventing it. They target young men, singly or in groups, demand identity papers and make frisks. Needing make arrests show that they are doing their job, they arrest for trivial offenses. Often these arrests seem remarkably perverse: the adolescent boy sitting with friends on his apartment's stoop, arrested for failing bring his identity papers that he says he can retrieve from his apartment if only allowed do this, or the young man arrested for responding a provocation deliberately aimed at achieving this result.Although the police occasionally beat people, Fassin observes that the meaning of violence extends deeper and beyond the physical act. It takes the form of what he calls moral violence, or the deliberate, almost sadistic humiliation, both of those physically beaten and those who, while not touched, are cruelly degraded. In nearly every stop the police cast insults, often pushing the point painfully and deeply, to institute a relationship of abasement and mortification (p. …
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Jul 31, 2016
Young-Jun Chun + 1
