The police aren’t racist!

Handcuffs thrown on the ground, hundreds of police officers across France line up defensively outside their stations. With their arms crossed and a sombre look on their face, they are expressing their discontent at the 8th June speech of the French Home Secretary, who announced a zero tolerance approach to police brutality and racism. Police officers are exhausted after several years of near continuous interventions (2015 attacks, “yellow jackets”, Covid) and feel let down by the government.

It is indeed unacceptable for a government to abdicate its responsibilities, to point out the errors of its departments, in a knee-jerk reaction to civil unrest, and call for immediate reform without offering at least a beginning of a response. A responsible government remains cohesive and commits to finding solutions with all the concerned parties.

 “The police aren’t racist!” hurls the general secretary of the Alliance Police union. The presenter of TF1’s Journal de 13h (News at 1) jumps on the bandwagon two days later with these words: “(…) the police force, claimed by some to be violent, (…)”, as a video of officers clapping for healthcare workers is being broadcast. Reflex response of a targeted individual feeling under attack? Normative discourse of the media trying to salvage the good reputation of the white civil servant at all costs?

Admittedly, many people would be inclined to reject such accusations – who would want to be considered violent or racist? Who would want to be labelled a manipulator or a crook? Yet it is a fact that violence and racism do exist within the police, here in France and elsewhere (although the day-to-day reality of French officers differs greatly from that of their US counterparts). Alas, a police badge (or one from any other public function for that matter) does not magically render its holder immune to prejudices or to the intricacies of the human psyche.

Are the failings of some police officers proof that all are violent or racist? Of course not. Yet, can it be concluded that the police force isn’t racist as only a handful of officers are? Unfortunately not because those officers belong to the force and, therefore, necessarily operate within the same rules, structures and duties that bind them all. Incidentally, most of those violent events took place in the presence of several colleagues; they are not the acts of officers operating alone and out of sight.

One cannot overlook the irony of this latest protest season. Police officers indicate that they have had “enough of stigma and generalisations”, in other words, they resent being considered violent or racist based on the acts of a few, and seeing the police associated with the very behaviours that the force is meant to punish. At the same time, the people coming out en masse in the streets to protest against police brutality (and not against the police itself) are, by and large, black and brown individuals denouncing the stigma they suffer from the media and society. Black and brown people who are on the receiving end of dangerous generalisations that mean they cannot escape discrimination, in any aspect of their life.

What others think of us holds power. As such, it is certainly difficult to shoulder blame, or to accept that our behaviour (intentional, conscious, or otherwise) may cause offence to others and tarnish our good name or reputation. But it is never a matter of being a good or a bad person, or kind vs. racist. We all have the same capacity for doing good or evil. Our individual experiences, knowledge and attributes combine in a given moment to push us towards one side or the other, according to the situation we are facing.

No one is immune to environmental conditioning–be it from family, friends, education, economic, social, legal, or religious systems, the media, the government, the climate, or urban planning. Hence, responsibility for racism and its eradication cannot be solely placed on those individuals whose behaviour is objectionable; the structures that foster, and occasionally sanction, those behaviours lie at the heart of the problem and must therefore be part of the solution.

Perhaps police and civil protesters alike could benefit from reflecting on the question that Alan Cohen asks us on 16 June in his book, A Daily Dose of Sanity – How do those who challenge you help you find greater strength and truth? Rather than seeing others as the source of our difficulties, let us change our perspective and see them as allies who help us grow.