By Steve Sailer
07/03/2023
I’m tired of these damn police simultaneously harassing and abandoning communities. They have to leave them alone and be far more proactive. It’s time for abolition — and empowerment.https://t.co/yzBDUEegCx
— Ben Sixsmith (@BDSixsmith) July 2, 2023
From The Guardian news section:
‘We are seen as less human’: inside Marseille’s districts abandoned by the police
In 2021 Emmanuel Macron promised victims of the city’s drug crime he would help. Grieving residents tell how he failed them
Mark Townsend in Marseille
@townsendmark
Sat 1 Jul 2023 13.09 EDT… Since then Amine and his mother had visited 55 grief-stricken families from the quartiers nord, each having lost a child to the city’s unrelenting drug wars. Both knew the tempo of killings and the levels of brutality were accelerating. But Macron offered little in response. “He didn’t really answer,” said Amine….
Instead, Busserine’s residents joked about the mammoth police presence required to guarantee Macron’s safety.
“So that’s where all the police are hiding. How many does one man need?” shouted Hamid, 18.
The presidential convoy would never learn firsthand that just hundreds of metres away, parts of the Marseille road network were no longer governed by the state. Access routes to nearby estates were shut by roadblocks controlled by drug gangs, who decided who came and went — pockets of France’s second city surrendered to traffickers.
As questions mount over levels of racial profiling by French police in the wake of the shooting in Nanterre, Marseille serves as a warning of what happens when the police lose control — or abandon — a community.
More broadly, the port is seen as a litmus test for France; if its most multicultural city can foster vast Muslim enclaves viewed with broad suspicion or hostility by the police, then what hope is there elsewhere?
For many, it came as little surprise that the southern port city witnessed some of the fiercest rioting on Friday night, when 88 people were arrested, a gun shop looted and police engaged in running battles with what they called “violent groups”.….
Speaking hours after the video first began circulating of the shooting of the teenager named as Nahel M in a Paris suburb on Tuesday, Amine said the police had already lost all credibility among the residents of Marseille’s cités.
Heavily armed officers occasionally poured into the estates in huge numbers, said Amine, before rapidly retreating, having dished out fines to passersby.
“They come for a few hours and fine everybody for lack of insurance or stupid things. Yet if they put 20 police all day and night in front of the traffickers, it would stop the violence.”
Joseph Downing, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations, who grew up on a London council estate and lives in Marseille, where he has studied the relationship between the cités and police, said it is impossible for Britons to grasp how awful the estates are.
“In terms of the disrepair of the housing stock, the absence of the state — the absence of anybody — we can’t comprehend it’s possible.
“The police are even scared to go there — for us this is unthinkable. These places are literally outside the state. If you call the police as a resident, they will not come.”
Setting Marseille slightly apart from other French cities is the proliferation of Kalashnikovs owned by gangs within the estates, a deadly variable that Downing said offers another excuse for police to swerve such places….
Last year a record 32 people were killed in score-settling by the city’s drug gangs. Already this year there have been 23 murders, with more than 50 wounded….
Standing like monoliths in front of the Provençal hills that encircle Marseille, the brutalist tower blocks of Frais Vallon constitute its biggest and arguably grimmest cité.
Here, about 7,000 people — average age 36 and mostly of Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian descent — are crammed into a slither of land hemmed in by motorways.
When reading anything about France, it’s hard to get a straight story on who exactly the rioters are. I can recall back in 2005 that everybody was sure that the rioters then were Muslim Arabs but it eventually turned out they were more black than brown.
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