At 8am on Tuesday 27 June, two police officers shot a 17-year-old man dead at the wheel of his car in Nanterre. In a video posted on social media, two police officers on motorbikes are heard ordering the driver to open the car door, one of them holding a gun to the driver’s head and shouting: “Open up or I’ll put a bullet in your head!”
We then see the car move forward and the policeman shoots the young man at point-blank range, even though the vehicle wasn’t moving towards him or endangering him. Once again, the police have killed a young person of North African origin in the French banlieue on the pretext of “resisting arrest”.
No, these are not “blunders”
The police claim “self-defence”: they allege that the car was running into them, which the video proves was not the case. The far right, a faithful ally of this system, is heaping its own racist ideas on top of police lies, by calling the victim a delinquent, because he comes from a working-class neighbourhood...
Such scenes would be unimaginable in rich neighbourhoods. Racism and anti-poor, anti-worker hatred are rampant among the police, who are waging a veritable war on the poor in working-class neighbourhoods. Their “blunders”, “accidents” and “self-defence” flow from this: arbitrary controls and police violence kill workers and the poor, who are usually young, black and North African.
The number of those killed by the police has been rising since a 2017 law made it easier to use firearms in cases of refusal to comply. Macron and Darmanin’s police think they can do anything, even murder!
An investigation has been opened for “voluntary manslaughter by a person in a position of public authority”, entrusted to the IGPN. A police force renowned for its inaction... and its determination to cover up for its troops. In 2022, only five of the thirteen deaths resulting from “refusal to comply” led to police officers being charged. The others were dismissed. And what can we expect from justice when the police crimes of Adama Traoré, Lamine Dieng, Ibrahima Bah and so many others have gone unpunished?
During the night, clashes broke out, first in Nanterre and the surrounding working-class neighbourhoods of Suresnes, Gennevilliers, Colombes and Asnières, then in other towns such as Mantes-la-Jolie, Aulnay-sous-Bois, Bordeaux and Roubaix.
The revolt is legitimate and it needs to be expressed and deepened. A section of the working people, one of its most precarious sections, is being singled out and targeted, and today it is reacting. Macron and his ministers are calling for “calm”. Not a word about the daily violence against young people in their own neighbourhoods. On the contrary, the police are responding to the widespread anger with arrests and beatings, and Darmanin is deploying reinforcements from the gendarmes [militarised part of the French police force].
The NPA is not calling for calm: no justice, no peace. We need to express our legitimate anger for truth and justice, against the police who kill, against their government sponsors and against all those who stir up racist hatred.
Despite all the talk of republican values, the role of the police is repression. Repression of social movements, exacerbated in recent years under the orders of Hollande, Valls, Cazeneuve, Macron and Darmanin. Repression of the Yellow Vests, the workers’ movement against pension reform, the Vertbaudet strikers [a months-long strike by an all-women workforce at a childcare products factory in northern France], the environmental and migrant movements...
The NPA calls for all forthcoming demonstrations to denounce this new murder. It calls on workers and young people to come together in their workplaces, places of study and neighbourhoods to decide how to express this legitimate anger and push back those responsible for this increasingly violent repression in the service of an unequal social order.
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