July 3, 2023 (GIN) – Tens of thousands of police clashed with young protestors after a teenager of North African descent was shot and killed at point blank range by officers during a traffic stop.

A funeral was held for Nahel M., age 17, in the Paris suburb of Nanterre as police made more than 700 arrests nationwide. It was the worst social upheaval in France in years.  

The protest ended with police firing tear gas and cars being set on fire.

The teen’s murder was caught on videos and contradicted the initial police report. The videos shared online show two police officers leaning into the driver-side window of a yellow car before the vehicle pulls away as one officer fires into the window. The videos show the car later crashed into a post nearby.

The driver died at the scene, the prosecutor’s office said. This led the prosecutor, Pascal Prache, to conclude that “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met” in the shooting.

The police officer has been placed in provisional detention, according to the prosecutor’s office.

The incident provoked the headline: ‘France faces a George Floyd moment’ – “as if we were suddenly waking up to the issue of racist police violence,” observed writer Rokhaya Diallo. “This naive comparison itself reflects a denial of the systemic racist violence that for decades has been inherent to French policing.”

Meanwhile, continued Diallo, “the number of cases of police brutality grows relentlessly every year. In France, young men perceived to be black or of North African origin are 20 times more likely to be subjected to police identity checks than the rest of the population… Why would we not feel scared of the police?

“In 1999,” continued Diallo, “our country, the supposed birthplace of human rights, was condemned by the European court of human rights for torture, following the sexual abuse by police of a young man of North African origin.  Now, after the death of Nahel, a UN rights body has urged France to address “profound problems of racism and racial discrimination” within its law enforcement agencies.

More recently, in December 2022, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination denounced both the racist discourse of politicians and police ID checks “disproportionately targeting certain minorities”.

Despite such overwhelming findings, our president, Emmanuel Macron, still considers the use of the term “police violence” to be unacceptable… Yet I fear that the focus is being placed on an individual police officer instead of questioning entrenched attitudes and structures within the police that are perpetuating racism. And not a single one of the damning reports and rulings has led to any meaningful reform of the police as an institution.

Worse, a law passed in 2017 has made it easier for police to shoot to kill without even having to justify it on the grounds of self-defense. Since this change in the law, the number of fatal shootings against moving vehicles has increased fivefold. Last year, 13 people were shot dead in their vehicles.

“Whatever our age, many of us French who are descended from postcolonial immigration carry within us this fear combined with rage, the result of decades of accumulated injustice.

“This year, we mark the 40th anniversary of the murder of Toumi Djaïdja, a 19-year-old from a Lyon slum, who became the victim of police violence that left him in a coma for two weeks. This was the genesis of the March for Equality and Against Racism, the first antiracist demonstration on a national scale, in which 100,000 people took part.

“The crimes of the police are at the root of many of the uprisings in France’s most impoverished urban areas”, said Diallo said, “and it is these crimes that must be condemned first.”