Police in the French capital widely use racial and ethnic profiling against Arabs and blacks, an investigative study has revealed, triggering warnings from officials and experts on the risk of creating a sense of injustice among minorities.
“Profiling? It exists,” Yazid Sabeg, France’s Commissioner for Diversity and Equal Opportunity, told the New York Times on Tuesday, June 30.
“It’s been an issue for a long time.”
A study by the Open Society Justice Initiative, carried out from November 2007 to May 2008, found that Arabs and blacks face bias from Paris police.
The researchers made an investigative analysis into police records and found that young Arab and black men are stopped for identity checks far more often than young whites.
From more than 500 stops at major Parisian transit stations, those who appeared to be of Arab origin were at least 7.5 times more likely than whites to be stopped.
Black were six times more likely than whites to be stopped.
The “Ethnic Profiling in Paris” study also found that blacks and Arabs were much more likely than whites to be frisked or detained.
Racial profiling and discrimination of any kind is prohibited by French laws.
The Paris-based anti-racism group SOS-Racism said recently that some French recruitment companies are applying racist policies and ethnic profiling in hiring, filtering out non-white candidates.
A 2007 UN fact-finding mission warned that France’s ethnic minorities are trapped in social and economic “ghettos” because of an “insidious racism” tolerated by politicians.
Sense of Injustice
Christopher Mendes, a 21-year black Parisian, says he is being stopped and searched, sometimes twice in the same day, while waiting for a suburban train home after work.
“Of course we’re being screened because of our color,” he told the NY Times.
“We see it every day.”
There is no official number of people of African or Arab origin in France as laws ban census based on ethnic or religious grounds.
Nathalie Duhamel, general secretary of the National Commission on Security Ethics, which investigates complaints against the police, says the problem with police profiling is that identity checks leave no trail to call officers to account.
“Some people complain to us about being searched multiple times. It can become a form of harassment.
“But it’s impossible for us to investigate, since there are no traces.”
Sabeg, an Algerian-born who was appointed by President Nicolas Sarkozy last December, believes that singling out people of minority groups would create a “sense of injustice” that would spell problems in the society.
He cited the 2005 incidents in the suburbs of Paris and 300 other cities and towns, when thousands of youths of African and Arab origin took to the streets in destructive riots, to tell the police “enough is enough.”
Their actions were sparked off by the deaths of two youths fleeing police.
“Social injustice and inequality of treatment produce aggression,” warns Sabeg.
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