Most incidents of urban unrest in recent decades - including the riots
in France, Britain and other Western countries - have followed lethal
interactions between the youth and the police. Usually these take place
in disadvantaged neighborhoods composed of working-class families of
immigrant origin or belonging to ethnic minorities. These tragic events
have received a great deal of media coverage, but we know very little
about the everyday activities of urban policing that lie behind them.
Over the course of 15 months, at the time of the 2005 riots, Didier
Fassin carried out an ethnographic study in one of the largest precincts
in the Paris region, sharing the life of a police station and cruising
with the patrols, in particular the dreaded anti-crime squads. Far from
the imaginary worlds created by television series and action movies, he
uncovers the ordinary aspects of law enforcement, characterized by
inactivity and boredom, by eventless days and nights where minor
infractions give rise to spectacular displays of force and where
officers express doubts about the significance and value of their own
jobs. Describing the invisible manifestations of violence and
unrecognized forms of discrimination against minority youngsters,
undocumented immigrants and Roma people, he analyses the conditions that
make them possible and tolerable, including entrenched policies of
segregation and stigmatization, economic marginalization and racial
discrimination.
Richly documented and compellingly told, this unique account of
contemporary urban policing shows that, instead of enforcing the law,
the police are engaged in the task of enforcing an unequal social order
in the name of public security.
