Immigrants face police violence in French cities

At a red light, a boy stops his scooter, not wearing a helmet. Within seconds, police officers approach him and ask him for the vehicle’s papers. Quickly, one becomes aggressive and insults the teenager, who pushes back and is roughly thrown to the ground.

But no one is hurt. The police car is imaginary, made of four chairs, and part of a programme, Policite, set up by a group of young men in the rough Lyon suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin who want to encourage smoother relations between locals and police.

Cyril Boccara claps to stop the scene in the community centre. “What went wrong here? What should the cops have done?” he asks the 25 teenagers gathered to talk about their fraught relationship with the police. They suggest the second officer could have tried to calm things down.

Such stand-offs are all too common for the youth of Vaulx-en-Velin, one of the most symbolic “banlieue”, a term for the poorer suburbs on the outskirts of big French cities inhabited largely by the descendants of immigrants.

After a year of anti-police protests, urban violence and a string of police brutality videos circulated on social media, police are under growing pressure to regain citizens’ trust.

Vaulx-en-Velin, where a third live in poverty, almost twice the national average, has made the news for its images of burning cars and rocks thrown at police since the 1980s.

“There is a real problem of representation: for [the police] all young people from the banlieues, I feel like we’re not fully considered like citizens. It’s like we don’t have any rights,” said Walid Semail, 20, a Policite organiser and business student from Vaulx-en-Velin.

I had evidence, I had support, and with all this it didn’t go anywhere. Basem Slimani

Several young men in the town said they had been arbitrarily arrested, insulted and hit by the police, echoing criticism of discrimination and violence by officers across France.

Basem Slimani was strangled, hit in the head and thrown to the ground by four officers as he filmed an identity check in Lyon, he said.

He went to several police stations, but all refused to take his complaint. He sent letters to the mayor and rights ombudsman and tried to press charges for over a year. But nothing happened. “I had evidence, I had support, and with all this it didn’t go anywhere.”

The government is taking steps to foster change, including getting all officers to wear body cameras by the summer. A review of national security laws is due to be presented before the presidential election next year.

In an attempt to get young people, from the banlieues in particular, to know the security forces better, the Interior Ministry has created 10,000 jobs and internships for people under 26.

Efforts to restore trust can appear doomed, however, when officials deny the prevalence of police brutality. “When I hear the words ‘police brutality’, I choke,” Grald Darmanin, the interior minister, said last year.

As President Macron seeks to woo Marine Le Pen’s far-Right voters on security issues, he may lean to appearing tough on security rather than pushing police reform.

Back in Vaulx-en-Velin, “absolutely nothing” had changed after five years of work, Semail said. The handful of face-to-face meetings with the local police have come to a halt. The local police precinct did not respond to requests for comment.

“The longer we do this, the more we realise it will take a long time for change to happen,” Semail said.