November 24, 2024, Martina Michie report blue bag“Ramy Elgaml died in an accident in Milan after an 8km police chase involving the scooter Elgami was traveling with his friend Fares Bouzidi. Elgami was 19 years old. He died in his neighbors Corvetto. Now ‘ A memorial of photos and flowers was erected next to a bed sheet with the words ‘Truth for Rami’ Elgami refused to stop at a police checkpoint.
On the website of SIR (Religious Information Service) agencyLorenzo Garbarino describes the Corvetto and the working-class urban areas, neighborhoods, exclusion, poverty, and crime that appear to be persistent factors in such events. “Redevelopment has been a long time coming, and so has the concentration of material and cultural poverty. The uprooting of the area has led to slow but steady devastation,” he wrote.
On the night Ramy Elgami died, Micciché continued, “the first protests began with burned trash cans and clashes with police. Others followed and were mentioned in the headlines with images of a Corvetto literally on fire.”
This scene echoes others already familiar: angry crowds in cities and political peripheries. It is also linked to other deaths elsewhere in Europe.
The most recent (though not chronologically most recent) ones to have resonated in the media in France are: Nahel Merzuuk (17), killed by police officers on June 27, 2023, when the car in which Merzouk was a front-seat passenger failed to stop at a checkpoint and struck police, who opened fire in self-defense. This is at least the version of events that the media initially picked up on.
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However, there are many video testimonies and they show a murder case. “Merzouk is another racist teenager and a victim of a police force influenced by systemic racism. This is the straw that broke the backs of dozens of working-class neighborhoods that have been neglected and neglected, ostracized by public services and left behind by young people. I’m rebelling.” Tom Dimas-Granza wrote mankind Last October, about a year after the incident occurred.
Racial profiling is a hidden factor.
For Micciché, “(Corvetto’s) protests speak to something much deeper than just refusing to stop at checkpoints, starting with racial profiling.”
Micciché echoes: mankind (a former French Communist Party organ, now independent but still close to the party and the left) recalls: “On 30 June 2023, the United Nations condemned institutional racism and the country’s ongoing discriminatory practices. The French government responded: 8 July 2023: ‘There is no evidence of racism or institutional discrimination in the French police. The accusations are also baseless.’
Merzuk lived in: quote Pablo-Picasso in Nanterre, where (according to 2019 data) almost half of the residents live below the poverty line.
In France, being a young-looking North African, Middle Eastern or African man is 20 times more likely to be stopped by the police (2017 data).
independent media company That’s just it! We have been reviewing people killed in police operations in France since 1977. “The victim’s profile was revealed: a male under 27 years of age with an African or North African name, living in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the cities of Paris, Lyon and Marseille.”
And elsewhere in Europe?
The intention here is not to list all the events, but to paint a panorama of structural problems.
Last September in Greece Muhammad Kamran AshiqA 37-year-old Pakistani immigrant died in police custody. Traces of assault were found on his body.
Just a few months ago, in July, after a visit to Greece, the Council of Europe’s Committee against Torture wrote, as reported by Human Right Watch: “He was detained by police at some police stations in Athens (Omonia and Colonos).”
British association Inquest published a report showing that black men are seven times more likely to die in custody than the rest of the UK population.
inspection SibioAccording to a study conducted within the European Data Journalism Network, in which Voxeurop participates, the total number (488 people) died in police custody or as a result of law enforcement actions between 2020 and 2022 in 13 EU countries. ), victims include: These are mainly immigrants and people with mental disabilities.
again blue bag, Leonardo Bianchi Write:
“On 27 September 2024, the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Promote Racial Justice and Equality in the Context of Law Enforcement published its report following a visit to Italy on 2-10 May 2024. It states that this includes a combination of criminalizing drug policies and racial profiling. “It raises significant human rights concerns and disproportionately affects minorities and other vulnerable groups.” Akua Kuenyehia, chair of the expert panel, also said: “Racial bias, stereotyping and profiling create harmful and false associations linking blackness to criminality and delinquency.” Similar conclusions were reached in another report published on 22 October 2024 and compiled by the European Committee Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), an independent non-EU human rights body established by the Council of Europe.”
September 9th, Media service integrationa German immigration analytics platform, published the results of a study conducted while accompanying police officers in Lower Saxony during routine operations. Compared to previous research on police racism in Germany, which focused on the attitudes or behavior of individual officers, Mediendienst’s study focuses on practices. Structure rather than individual. Is there a risk of structurally increasing discrimination against certain groups in your daily work habits or procedures? Spoiler alert: Yes.
The research team observed that police-conducted background checks primarily affected people who could (possibly) be perceived as immigrants, especially young men, those with left-wing political views, and young people perceived as Arab or Turkish. (The full study can be found here).
In 2011, a groundbreaking study for law enforcement analysis was published in France. force of order (“The Power of Order”, Seuil), anthropologist Didier Fassin. The book contains Fassin’s fieldwork, which lasted almost two years (2005-2007), with the “BAC” (Brigade anti-criminalité, anti-crime brigade) in the Paris suburbs. Fassin explains what it means for young men to be systematically stopped and checked, arbitrarily arrested, and the actions taken are disproportionate, multiple times a day, sometimes by the same police officers.
He also describes the boredom of agents and the pressure to “make up the numbers” in the agency (when their shifts are over, they literally “hang around” for immigrants). So there is the banality of racism and the impact of the political context.
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