Residents or undesirables? How ordinary citizens shape policing practices in Paris
Residents or undesirables? How ordinary citizens shape policing practices in Paris
Image Christophe Badouet (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, November 8th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas)
Residents or undesirables?
How ordinary citizens shape policing practices in Paris
Charlotte Corchete & Magda Boutros
PhD Student & Assistant Professor (Sciences Po-CRIS)
How do ordinary citizens shape policing practices that disproportionately target racialised groups?
Existing research is inconclusive. Some studies show that quality-of-life policing is driven by resident grievances; others find little correlation between citizen complaints and police actions. We also know little about how the police respond to competing demands for more, or fewer, police interventions.
This paper draws on a qualitative data analysis of interviews, observations, and judicial archives in two Parisian neighbourhoods (12th and 18th arrondissements), to analyse the institutional processes through which the police handle residents' grievances about public space. We show how these processes become a space where the police and a subset of residents jointly construct and legitimate a racialized spatial order, in which Black and Arab young men are deemed "out of place" in the neighbourhoods where they live and work.
Two main mechanisms emerge:
- institutional procedures to respond to resident grievances systematically exclude voices advocating for inclusive public spaces;
- these procedures reinforce a vision of spatial order where certain groups are labeled "undesirable" and their eviction legitimated, regardless of their behaviour.
The paper contributes to the sociology of policing and urban sociology by showing how police procedures for responding to residents' concerns can lead to the legitimation of a racialised spatial order.
