2023-12-27 07:03:27
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Death of Nahel in Nanterre
Published on 12/27/2023 08:03
Reading time: 5 min The Couronneries neighborhood police station in Poitiers, July 25, 2023, one month after the urban riots which shook the neighborhood. (MATHIEU HERDUIN / MAXPPP)
At the end of June 2023, urban riots occurred in several cities in France after the death of young Nahel in Nanterre. Since then, government measures put in place or planned have struggled to satisfy in working-class neighborhoods, such as in the Trois-Cités district, in Poitiers.
On June 27, neighborhoods burst into flames to denounce the death of young Nahel, killed by a police officer in Nanterre near Paris. Around forty measures have since been unveiled by the government, with more sanctions for young offenders and their parents, but also more social diversity in these priority areas. Except that on the ground, some have the feeling that nothing has changed, that their anger has remained a dead letter.
In the priority district of Trois-Cités in Poitiers, Abou leans against a friend’s car, parked in front of the small shopping center where windows broken six months ago have still not been replaced, and says to himself: “all this for nothing“. “It was to be heardexplains Abou. But it didn’t do much good. We saw that it started to make noise, that everyone was talking about it. Even the media talked about it, although usually it’s none of their business.”
“We said to ourselves that it was the time to change things. But two weeks later, they had already all folded and it was already back to the abayas, things like that… We saw that It was no use.”
Abou, resident of Trois-cités in Poitiers
at franceinfo
Bambo thinks like him: “It seems like they didn’t hear us, because they released the policeman after six months even though he killed someone anyway.” Abou shares this feeling of injustice since the release of this police officer who shot Nahel, and who remains under judicial control: “We all have hatred, because it can happen to everyone. I’m afraid of being killed by the police.” According to them, the riots did not trigger any reaction in the police: checks are still present in their daily lives, sometimes several times a day, they say. They themselves speak of “facies control”, or, This is what they were waiting for the government to do. There has been no announcement about this.
“We are filling a void”
Their anger has no political outlet. Instead, it is the grassroots associations that receive it and try to meet expectations. “Le chemin des possibilities” is a small association from Trois-Cités in Poitiers which was born just before the riots. “There are more associations, and more politics at the neighborhood level, but it is deterioratingdeplores Anais, one of the founders of the association. It’s good to be in politics, it’s good to propose projects, but if they are not adapted to people, you can put all the money in the world into it, if it is not accessible to young people, that will not be used. It’s going to sleep in some sort of folder. Up there, they will say we achieved things, and down below, they will say they achieved nothing. How do we make the link? The door is there, the young person is there, the need is there, the offer is there, but if there is no communication, nothing happens.”
And as long as the announcements are not translated onto the ground and as long as there is no concrete action, such as the Republican Action Forces that the government promises to bring institutions closer to residents, there will be a need to fill, explains Toura, Anaïs’ colleague. “What is politics today? Every day, I deal with it when I talk to young people. When a young person comes to confide their problems to me, when they are looking for work or when their mother comes to see me and said: ‘My son is imprisoned, what are the steps for me to go see him in the visiting room?’ It’s politics in the noble sense of the term. Afterwards, we are not politicians, we fill a void. But why every time, they come to see me because in fact they are ashamed to go see the institutions. We have the same codes and they are perhaps more comfortable. They say perhaps that Toura is like my son, and that will remain between him and me”explains the member of the association.
The limitation of exercise is the lack of support. The association “Le chemin des possibilities” is asking for even just premises, and is multiplying requests for funding in vain.
Toura, member of the Le chemin despossibles association, in front of the Trois-Cités shopping center in Poitiers, December 2023. (VICTORIA KOUSSA / RADIO FRANCE)
“Working-class neighborhoods are seen as anecdotal”
The divide therefore persists, but how can we move forward? For Marion Carrel, professor of sociology at the University of Lille, “part of the solution lies in an ambitious public policy towards working-class neighborhoods”. But the sociologist, who conducted a study on the riots six months ago,
recalls that the population of these working-class neighborhoods “is considered historically uninteresting because it does not vote. And it turns out that since 2017, working-class neighborhoods have been seen as anecdotal by the executive. The burial of the Borloo plan and the drastic drop in budgets for politics of the city from 2007, after that it went up a little but it still remains low”.
“We are in measures which are to say the poor are the problem, we must mix them. The young people of these neighborhoods are the problems, we must educate them.”
Marion Carrel, professor of sociology at the University of Lille
at franceinfo
Marion Carrel recognizes that it is necessary to put in place measures related to education and security, “but if that’s all it is, of course it reinforces the gap. And we have all the keys to reproducing these phenomena of violent eruption of anger and rage among young people in particular, who cannot cope no more of this discrepancy between the fact that we see them as savages who are mistreated and who can die on the street corner following a police stop that goes wrong”notes the specialist.
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