“HEY YOU THERE!

The Police Are the Punishment

Didier Fassin

“It was not a desire for vengeance, but a desire for justice,”
the lawyer told the court at a trial I attended a few months before I started my
ethnographic research on urban policing in the banlieues of Paris.1 The defen-
dants were seven police officers indicted for acts of violence that had occurred a
year earlier. The photographs of the plaintiff, a man from Turkey, whose swollen
and bruised face appeared on the front page of a Turkish monthly soon after the
incident, left little doubt about the brutality he had endured at the hands of the
law enforcement agents. Based on the complete case file given to me by the public
prosecutor after a conversation we had later on, I could piece together the story of
the unfortunate man.
On New Year’s Eve, the local police station had received a phone call from
the resident of a housing project who was reporting a scuffle that had started at a
family party after intruders had tried to get into the community hall where it was
held. It was late in the night. The officers on duty, who had been celebrating the
holiday and were by then fairly intoxicated, rushed to the scene ten miles away,
lights flashing and sirens wailing. More than two dozen agents from neighboring
precincts hurriedly joined them. All were heavily equipped with riot gear, hel-

This essay is based on the keynote lecture that I gave at the conference “Policing the City: Vio-
lence, Visibility, and the Law,” at Stanford University on March 30, 2017, but I have almost entirely
rewritten it. I am thankful to Caren Kaplan and Andrea Miller for their helpful comments on an
earlier version. I also express my gratitude to the commissioner of the precinct and the prosecutor of
the jurisdiction for having facilitated the research on which this essay is based, the former by giving
me permission to conduct fieldwork for fifteen months with the police of his district, the latter by
providing me the hundreds of pages of the case file of the court case reported here. I finally want to
manifest my appreciation to the officers for their patience and candor as they have accepted my pres-
ence with them on patrols during these many days and nights.
1. The trial and the events that led to the prosecution of the officers are narrated and analyzed in
detail in Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Fassin 2013).

Public Culture 31:3 doi 10.1215/08992363-7532691

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 Public Culture mets, and batons. When they arrived on the premises, the project was calm, with
only the distant voices of a group of people conversing near the place where the
party had taken place. At the sight of the sudden and impressive deployment of
the police force rushing into the alleys, these bystanders started to run away. They
were immediately chased by the agents. After a few minutes of stampeding and
shouting, which generated angry protests from inhabitants at the windows of their
apartments, the meager prey was brought back to the cars and taken into custody:
two men, one of Caribbean origin, the other from Turkey. The former was appar-
ently walking away from the community hall, the latter was also quietly return-
ing home after another family gathering. Both were badly hurt, the Turkish man
being later diagnosed at the hospital with a perforation of the eardrum, periorbital
hematomas, and acromioclavicular strain.
It appeared during the investigation conducted by a judge during the follow-
ing months that the two men had experienced similar physical assaults. As they
were trying to flee from the aggressive and inebriated officers, they were brutally
stopped, pinned to the ground, beaten with batons and sprayed with tear gas. Even
after they had been handcuffed, they continued to be roughed up, punched, and
kicked, first in the street, then in the car, and eventually at the station. Rather than
being taken to the hospital for a medical examination, they were initially held in
custody. Only the following day were they permitted to see a physician, who wrote
impressive forensic reports. The accusation of insulting an officer and resisting
arrest that was filed against them should have led to an immediate appearance trial
and a probable prison sentence, but, as the public prosecutor told me, because of
the international resonance of the incident, the Ministry of Justice requested that,
in contrast with what usually happens in similar situations, this case of police vio-
lence be treated in an exemplary manner by the judicial system. In fact, only the
Turkish victim, supported by his community, lodged a complaint, the Caribbean
man deciding to avoid the expenses and troubles of a lawsuit.
To affirm that the investigation was a model of fairness would be an over-
statement, as all seventy-­nine witnesses interviewed were police officers with the
exception of a few firefighters; no one from the project was heard by the judge.
During the trial, it was revealed that at the beginning of the intervention, the ser-
geant major had galvanized his troops with this conspicuous encouragement: “We
lost the Algerian War. Forty years ago, we chickened out. We’re not going to do
it again today. Take no prisoners! It’s no holds barred!” Despite this acknowledg-
ment by the accused officers, the public prosecutor chose not to consider this cry
to be an aggravating circumstance, which should have been invoked if it had been
deemed racist or discriminatory. As he told me, the case would have been more

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 difficult to establish in court, although the aggressive call by the officer in charge The Police Are
of the squad having been uttered as his men were bursting into a neighborhood the Punishment
whose residents were for the most part North and sub-­Saharan Africans from
former French colonies, its racist meaning and discriminatory implications were
blatant.
Partly as a result of this choice, the verdict was lenient, as it is almost always
the case when the police are indicted. One officer was acquitted. Six, who had
acknowledged their involvement in the assaults, received four-­month suspended
prison sentences without mention in their criminal record, which meant that the
punishment had no consequence on their future professional activity. They were
also required to collectively pay twelve thousand euros to the victim for bodily
injury and moral wrong. Three years later, however, the Turkish man had still not
received one cent from his aggressors, who had in the meantime been posted in
other precincts. When his lawyer inquired of the Ministry of the Interior where the
officers were then working so as to be able to claim the payment of the damages,
the official answer he got from the administration was . . . that it did not know.
In light of these well-­documented events, the counsel’s statement that the use
of force by the officers expressed their “desire for justice” may sound surrealistic.
One has to simply imagine the two men being beaten up during their arrest even
after having been handcuffed and again roughed up while in custody, while there
was absolutely no evidence of their involvement in any wrongdoing and while,
moreover, it was not even clear from the testimonies collected on the spot that
there had ever been more than a verbal altercation at the party. However, I want
to take seriously the lawyer’s claim or rather explore the possibility that such vio-
lence be thought as ordinary punishment, and therefore as a form of retributive
justice.
In the present case, as in many others that I have witnessed or been told of, the
punishment takes two forms: physical, with the thrashing in the street and at the
station; and legal, with the initial accusation of insulting an officer and resisting
arrest. It also often includes a moral dimension, via the debasement and humilia-
tion of the individual arrested. My assertion undoubtedly goes against common-
sense, according to which such acts are pure brutalization, although the officers’
counsels pleaded that they should be excused in the allegedly warlike context of
public housing, as well as against a long tradition of both legal theory and moral
philosophy, whose definition of punishment precisely excludes these acts for being
outside the judicial realm.
Against these views, I want to examine the retributive dimension of the exer-
tion of violence in policing. Because it is a justified or justifiable practice in the

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 Public Culture eyes of many officers, because it is effectively protected by the institution, because
it is treated with clemency by the judges, because it may even be encouraged by
the state, and perhaps above all because it targets certain populations, namely,
low-­income categories belonging to ethno-­racial minorities — all affirmations that
I will develop — I argue that it should be regarded as a form of punishment. Far
from being a deviant practice, it reveals that, for what concerns its lower seg-
ments, society delegates a significant part of the retributive justice process to the
police. This shift of the perspective on punishment has major theoretical as well
as political implications.

The Problem with the Dirty Harry Problem

Such argument is nevertheless not entirely new. If the word punishment does not
appear as an entry in the indexes of most classics on the police written by crimi-
nologists, from William Westley, Jerome Skolnick, and James Q. Wilson to Peter
Manning, Albert Reiss, and Jean-­Paul Brodeur, the idea of punishment is some-
times present between the lines as a potential manifestation of the discretionary
power of law enforcement agents, although it is generally presented as a moral
justification of their seemingly deviant practices.
The best illustration of this indulgent interpretation is Carl Klockars’s (1980)
famous paper “The Dirty Harry Problem.” It is inspired by Inspector Callahan,
alias Dirty Harry, the hero played by Clint Eastwood in the eponymous 1971
crime thriller directed by Don Siegel. A man of few words and bad temper who
has the reputation of dealing with difficult cases his own way, Callahan is involved
in the case of a serial killer who terrorizes the city. As the justice system proves
incapable of stopping the criminal from committing murders and even releases
him because of procedural issues after he has been arrested, Callahan ends up
substituting himself for it. Against his superiors’ orders, he tails the criminal, at
one point uses torture to have him confess where he is keeping a young woman
who is later found dead, and finally, after an epic chase, as the man has taken a
dozen children hostage in a school bus, shoots him dead. By executing the crimi-
nal in cold blood, he thus administers justice: he punishes the odious culprit.
For Klockars (1980: 33), the story illustrates a fundamental dilemma: “Polic-
ing constantly places its practitioners in situations in which good ends can be
achieved by dirty means.” In the film, this dilemma, the insolvability of which is
epitomized in the last scene by Callahan throwing his badge into the water of the
pond where the serial killer’s dead body is sinking, takes an extreme and almost
caricatured form as, on the one hand, the criminal is a dangerous and sadistic

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 psychopath, and on the other hand, both law enforcement and judicial institutions The Police Are
prove to be impotent. Under these circumstances, the viewer is expected not only the Punishment
to feel sympathy for the solitary righter of wrongs but also to understand that the
police need to use dirty means for good ends if they want to protect society from
crime. Significantly, the more general questions raised by Klockars (39) on the
basis of the story concern only the dirty means. Can they be justified as punish-
ment? Should they in turn be punished? But he never challenges the good ends.
Even in the less dramatic case of stops and frisks, for which racial profiling has
long been documented, he finds arguments to exonerate the officers from their
discriminatory practices: “Although the probability of coming upon a dangerous
felon is extremely low, policemen quite reasonably take the possibility of doing
so as a working assumption on the understandable premise that once is enough.”
There is no questioning of the real grounds of such practices, that is, the imposi-
tion of a social order targeting racial minorities belonging to disadvantaged neigh-
borhoods. Instead, the official explanation provided by the agents is accepted.
This interpretation of policing, based merely on the reproduction of the agents’
justifications, is not infrequent in criminological writings, in particular in the
literature on police culture.
Yet, in the fifteen months of my ethnographic research in the largest French
police district, where crime rates were significantly higher than the national aver-
age, I have far more often observed dirty means for dirty ends, as was the case in
the assaults against the Caribbean and Turkish men, than dirty means for good
ends, as in Dirty Harry’s scenario.2 But I contend that in both cases, from a socio-
logical perspective, the violence perpetrated — on innocent passers-­by or on the
serial killer — should be regarded as a form of retribution. The argument that I
want to make here is that in the eyes of law enforcement agents as well as, in many
cases, from the perspective of their institution, the excessive use of force can find
its justification as a legitimate, if not legal, way to dispense justice on the street.

2. The research was carried out from May 2005 to February 2006 and from February 2007 to
June 2007 in a district of the Paris region with levels of poverty and unemployment, a proportion
of foreign and immigrant populations, and crime rates all significantly above the national average.
There were both middle-­class residential areas and lower-­class housing projects. As was the case in
many urban districts, the police were composed of regular officers in uniform patrolling in marked
vehicles and of special anticrime squads with plain-­clothes officers driving unmarked cars. Although
they had somewhat distinct missions, the former covering the entire range of law enforcement activi-
ties and the latter being specialized in red-­handed arrests, they participated most of the time in the
same operations, with the main difference being that the anticrime squad officers had the justified
reputation of being more aggressive than their colleagues and also of being more effective in terms
of arrest, not least because they provoked youths, especially those from an immigrant background.

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 Public Culture In 1979, Malcolm Feeley (1992) published a book that had a profound influence
on court studies and soon became a classic in the sociolegal field. The Process
Is the Punishment, subtitled Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court, shows
that, contrary to common representations of the administration of justice, in the
great majority of cases, especially those regarding minor offenses, decisions are
made and sentences imposed outside procedural justice. Only one-­third of the
defendants facing jail time have a counsel. Bails imposed on arbitrary criteria
lead to defendants being detained before adjudication twice more often than as the
consequence of jail sentences. Plea bargaining rather than adversarial confronta-
tion with prosecutors results in the fact that only a minority of defendants have a
fair trial. Costs, both direct, related to the bail, the lawyers’ fees, and the court’s
procedures, and indirect, in terms of time spent within the judicial bureaucracy
and risk of losing one’s job, imply a profound inequality before the justice system.
It should be noted that, the study having been conducted four decades ago, that is,
before the hardening of the penal system, the enactment of mandatory sentencing
laws, and the further pressure on defendants to accept to plead guilty rather than
exercise their right to stand trial in court, most of its findings would look even
more valid today.
The crucial conclusion drawn by Feeley is that the pretrial phase, which most
of the time is paradoxically not even followed by a trial, is where justice is com-
monly dispensed, that multiple social factors unrelated to the case appear more
determining than the alleged offense itself, and that the combination of these
elements produces profound disparities. I want to extend these conclusions by
showing that even before what Feeley calls “the process,” with its attorneys and
judges, bailiffs and sheriffs, bail bondsmen and bail commissioners, representa-
tives of family relations and drug treatment programs (or the equivalent major
players and supporting actors in other parts of the world), there are the police,
which play a crucial role, in the street and at the precinct, as part of the punitive
system. It is a sort of pre-­pretrial, which may or may not precede a trial — or even
a pretrial — and can be either a contributing factor to the judicial process (the
framing of the person and/or his indictment) or entirely self-­contained (a corporeal
and/or moral chastisement). In other words, for many of those who, whether guilty
or not, have regular encounters with them, the police are the punishment.

Bypassing the Definitional Stop

But what is punishment? To affirm that it is part of police practices, one has to cir-
cumscribe what it is. Legal theorists and moral philosophers have long attempted

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 to give an answer to this question. The most widely accepted definition, that of The Police Are
H. L. A. Hart (1959), half a century ago, provides five decisive criteria. Punish- the Punishment
ment is (1) the infliction of a pain or of an unpleasant equivalent (2) to an actual
or supposed offender (3) in response to an offense against legal rules (4) that are
intentionally imposed by a legal authority and (5) administered by human beings
with appropriate roles. Although the definition is said to be independent from any
justification, it assumes that punishment is both legitimate, since it sanctions an
offender for the offense he has committed, and legal, since it is applied for a vio-
lation of the law by appropriate means defined by the law. Under this normative
definition (which describes not what punishment is, but what ought to be regarded
as punishment), law enforcement has no place, except as the lawful provider of
cases for the judicial system. The police are not supposed to inflict pain on indi-
viduals suspected of having committed a misdeed, and their legal authority does
not imply that such would be an appropriate role for them.
But should we limit our inquiry to the verification of the matching of actual
practices with the a priori definition? In fact, Hart himself insisted that one should
never use what he called a “definitional stop” — allowing one to say whether a
given action is or is not a punishment — to elude a more radical and critical ques-
tioning about the nature and rationale of the act of punishing. To avoid this pitfall,
I will reverse the reasoning by approaching the delimitation of punishment not
through an a priori definition but via an ex post facto reconstitution based on the
observation of reality. I will not start with the ideal of what punishment ought to
be but instead analyze actual scenes to try to apprehend what it is.
One late winter afternoon, in a middle-­class neighborhood, two young men
were coming home from a basketball game when they saw two of their friends
being searched by two motorcycle officers on the side of the road. As they passed
by, they greeted them jokingly with a “Salaam alaikum!” to which one of the
law enforcement agents aggressively retorted, “We’re in France here, we speak
French.” The two youths were indeed French and born in France, but their par-
ents were Senegalese. They talked back to the officers, who insulted them in
return, calling them “filthy apes” and “fucking niggers,” to which the young-
sters responded with “French assholes.” At this point, the police jumped on their
motorcycles, and the two boys ran off toward their home. A few minutes later, the
one-­level detached house where they had found refuge was surrounded by several
police vehicles with flashing lights, which had been called in for reinforcement.
Helmeted, batons in hand, the officers broke the front window and rushed into the
living-­room where the terrified mother of the two youngsters, trying to protect
them, was thrown to the floor. They grabbed the boys, took them to the ground,

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 Public Culture and started to hit them while handcuffing them. The pastor, who belonged to an
evangelical church in the United States, later told me that the assault was so vio-
lent that it reminded him of the infamous beating of Rodney King.
In the meantime, alerted by the cries, a crowd of local residents had gath-
ered, indignantly protesting against the brutality of the officers. Several were in
turn shoved aside and threatened to be apprehended. In the middle of the turmoil
provoked by the intervention, the two youngsters were taken into the police sta-
tion and kept in custody under the accusation of insulting an officer and resisting
arrest. In the evening, the event was reported in the news on television, as a neigh-
bor had filmed the scene on his telephone. The following day a demonstration
against police violence took place in the center of the city, and three weeks later a
meeting was held with inhabitants of the family’s neighborhood, representatives of
the municipal council, and religious leaders, but no one from the law enforcement
agency attended. People declared that they had been particularly appalled by the
racist slurs hurled by the officers not only at the youth but also at the neighbors,
several of them belonging to ethnoracial minorities. The pastor told me that he
had been all the more shocked since he knew the boys whom he described as well-­
educated and well-­behaved students. The commissioner said to me that his men
had simply reacted to the offensive attitude of the youngsters. As I was discussing
the event with members of the anticrime squad, one of them commented that he
had not been surprised by how the incident turned out, the motorcycle officer who
was at the origin of the disorder being known to be “a crazy brute.” The boys’
parents filed a complaint against him and his colleagues. However, both charges
against the youths for insulting an officer and resisting arrest and against the
police for aggravated assault were abandoned a few months later after the agent
who had been the most confrontational and brutal died in a traffic accident.
Such events were common during my research. Similar ones are regularly
reported all over the country. They do not generally exceed a local confrontation
with bruises, slurs, and arrests. They sometimes end in deaths, however, almost
always of young men of color from disadvantaged environments, and lead to urban
disorders.3 This is how the 2005 riots started: a group of adolescents being chased
by the police in a project for a theft they had not committed; three of them finding
refuge in an electric transformer where two died while the third one was severely
burnt; the police, although aware of the danger, deciding not to intervene; the gov-

3. A list of the individuals killed as a result of an interaction with the police between 2005 and
2015 has been established by Urgence-­notre-­police-­assassine en toute impunité 2019. For the year
2017, nineteen persons died after having been shot by the police, and fifteen more casualties resulted
from other circumstances (Jean-­Marc B. 2018).

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 ernment, instead of expressing sympathy for the victims, defaming them as thugs. The Police Are
Fortunately, most of these incidents have less tragic outcomes and even remain the Punishment
ignored by the public, except in the neighborhoods where they have happened and
whose inhabitants often remain traumatized. The originality of the present case is
that the young men did not belong to the working class, did not live in a housing
project, and were not school dropouts — hence the fact that they did not expect to
be treated by the police as they were. But they were black. In a certain sense, the
racial — and racist — dimension was pure, not mixed with the other two with which
it is usually intertwined: the social and the spatial. Hence the consternation of the
local residents who thought that upward mobility and neighborhood gentrification
protected them from police mistreatment. They were proven wrong.
But should we consider the violence deployed by the police in this incident
to be punishment? Is it not mere abuse of power, sheer domination, pure repres-
sion? And since it is in response to an alleged offense against the police, is it not
simply reprisal? Let us examine these two interpretations. According to the first
option — the violence hypothesis — such set of actions would simply be an excess
in the use of force, which is how authorities often tend to minimize such incidents,
or, in legal language, would be inappropriate and disproportionate use of coercion,
which is what the defendants’ lawyers try to dismiss. That there is brutality can-
not definitely be doubted, but is it just that? According to the second option — the
vengeance hypothesis — the operation is a mere retaliation by the police against
the youths who have talked back to them. That the reactions of the officers be a
form of reprisal leaves little doubt, but should we be satisfied with this analysis?
My argument is that there is more to the incident than violence and retaliation.
Revisiting the first hypothesis, we can affirm, in accordance with Egon Bittner
(1980: 37), that “the police authorization” to use force is “essentially unrestricted,”
rendering the “talk about the lawful use of force practically meaningless.” Second,
in agreement with Émile Durkheim (1984: 47), we can state that “punishment has
remained for us what it was for our predecessors,” meaning that it is “an act of
vengeance.” In other words, the fact that, in the incident recounted, there be acts
of brutality and a sense of revenge does not exclude the possibility that it is also
a form of punishment, that is, the administration of a form of justice in the street
meant to correct an alleged wrong. What evidence can we have of such intention?
They are of two sorts: one, subjective, refers to the meaning given by the officers
to their action; the other, objective, concerns the interpretation that we can make
of the course of action. In the case of police abuse, both strongly speak in favor
of punishment.

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 Public Culture The Moral Argument for Police Abuse

From their subjective viewpoint, the agents themselves consider their violent ver-
bal and physical practices to be just deserts. It is not only that they try to mask
their reprehensible practices because they fear the consequences from their hier-
archy or the judges. They do find moral justifications for their acts. These are of
two kinds, having to do with their public and with the judges.
Officers view the lower classes, which constitute the main part of their public,
as criminal, with little capacity of discernment when they deal with ethnoracial
minorities, since they are “not attuned to the signs of respectability” within them,
as Robert Reiner (2000: 93) writes. They know of course that not all the inhabit-
ants of the projects commit crime, but they have a hard time differentiating among
them those who should be deemed suspect, largely because of ethnoracial preju-
dices that are reinforced during their training in the academy and their socializa-
tion with older colleagues. Indeed, eight out of ten officers come from rural areas
and small towns where they hardly ever have contact with anyone from immigrant
origin and are all the same posted for their first position in urban districts with
high proportions of minorities. “They are unable to recognize thugs from hon-
est people,” the commissioner told me. “They cannot imagine that a black guy
with a hoodie can be a PhD student and not a hoodlum,” the mayor observed in
one of our conversations. Moreover, in their eyes, even when people from these
neighborhoods have not done anything wrong, they are viewed either as potential
criminals, who may not have been arrested for a previous offense, or as mute
accomplices, who do not tell what they supposedly know. Their belief does not
seem to be affected by the dual evidence that, on the one hand, the great majority
of the inhabitants of the housing projects where they patrol have never had deal-
ings with the police, and that, on the other hand, they receive calls and sometimes
information from residents about local dealers or gangsters. But this confusion is
effective in justifying that, even if they do not arrest the right person, those who
are caught either have committed some offense for which they may not have been
punished or have been aware of it without reporting it to the police. Like the wolf
in La Fontaine’s fable, replying to the lamb who protests his innocence, the offi-
cers could retort: “If not you, then your brother. All the worse . . .” Or “someone
else in your clan. For to me you’re all of you a curse.” This representation of the
lower classes as composed of actual criminals, potential criminals, and accom-
plices of criminals thus legitimizes the harsh treatment they received.
Such negative generalization is in line with the officers’ view that the popu-
lation in general is hostile. Despite opinion polls showing that they are the most

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 appreciated civil servants, they remain convinced, or persuade themselves, that The Police Are
the public has no sympathy for them. This misperception is, again, differenti- the Punishment
ated: it mostly concerns the youths of immigrant origin, in particular those from
disadvantaged neighborhoods. “They don’t like us, the bastards,” commented the
chief of the anticrime squad as we were slowly driving by a group of African and
Arab youths who were watching us. The term bastard was the common way of
designating young people belonging to ethnoracial minorities that they dealt with.
After a short pause, he added, “But we don’t like them either.” This imagined or
actual antagonism serves two functions. First, it makes reciprocity reasonable,
as the officers’ animosity seems to them a relevant response to the population’s
animosity, the badges of the anticrime squads clearly attesting to their worldview:
one of them depicts, against the background of the French national flag, the tall
blocks of a stylized representation of a housing project seen through a gun sight,
while another shows a spider trapping a complex of high buildings in its web.
Second, it reinforces group solidarity and “esprit de corps,” as officers consider
that they have to defend themselves against these potential enemies, both when
they confront them directly in the street and when they have to testify about the
deviant acts committed by one of their colleagues. Seeing their publics as hostile
definitely makes abuses easier to produce and cover.
Moreover, officers regard judges as too lenient toward the suspects they arrest,
since “in their eyes their decision to lay a charge or charges deserves to be sup-
ported by judges by punishment that establishes the authority of the law enforce-
ment machinery,” as Richard Ericson (1982: 68) explains. “We arrest criminals
and the next day they are outside again. The judges have freed them. One wonders
what we work for.” Such was the lament often heard during our patrols through
the projects. Again, evidence contradicts this assertion. National statistics dem-
onstrate that the justice system is particularly severe, that this toughness increases
over the years, and that it focuses on petty crime. In fact, the reason the police
believe that judges are sabotaging their work is that they often arrest suspects
without minimal proof. As a sergeant told his men one evening: “There have been
too many police abuses, we have taken too many liberties. It’s like us with the
youngsters: we don’t trust them. Well, you know what? The judges feel the same
way about us.” But his call for probity could not be heard because the police’s
misrepresentation had an important social function: disqualifying the judges as
merciful legitimizes their own eagerness to dispense justice in their stead.
As a result of their prejudices regarding both crime in the lower classes and
clemency of the justice system, officers find a moral justification to what they
deem just retribution toward individuals who, in their view, definitely deserve it

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 Public Culture but might not be punished otherwise. This retribution can be inflicted on a sus-
pect. But it often affects innocent people in two ways — randomly or collectively.
Random punishment, exemplified by the Caribbean and Turkish men, means that
anyone in the group, usually the slowest runner or the least lucky passer-­by, gets
beaten up, arrested, and indicted in place of the supposed culprit. It is blind jus-
tice. In these situations, the retribution can be both immediate and deferred. On
the spot, individuals are roughed up as they try to run away or even simply hap-
pen to be present at the scene, with an outcome in some cases of severe injuries.
Then, they can be taken in to the station where intimidation goes on with threats
of being kept in custody and referred to the prosecutor. Generally, however, for
lack of evidence of wrongdoing, they are released, as the officers are content with
the distress caused by the handcuffing in front of friends, relatives, and neighbors
and the questioning dotted with menaces. This daunting experience ends up with
their being back in the street far from their home, sometimes in the middle of the
night, a practice that has been denounced by a judges’ union as a common form
of iniquitous punishment. In other cases, especially when the individuals have
been injured and might be tempted to file a complaint for police violence, the
officers indict them for insulting an officer and resisting arrest, an offense that can
lead to up to two years in prison and a thirty thousand euro fine. Such practice
is doubly beneficial from the police’s perspective, since punishment is inflicted
firstly in the street, where the person has been thrashed, and secondly in court,
where he faces serious consequences. Collective punishment consists in abus-
ing the whole group, with its members being scared, reviled, pushed, thumped,
and menaced with weapons, as was the case in the arrest of the two young men
of Senegalese origin. A deputy commissioner told me that she was aware of the
deleterious effects of such actions and often tried to avoid them, but she conceded
that it was usually in vain, as her troops wanted immediate retribution. In fact,
such brutal operations could further affect the assaulted neighborhood, by creat-
ing a breach of trust among the inhabitants, especially when it is a resident who
calls the police in the first place.
Remarkably, whether it is targeted on a suspect, random or collective, such ret-
ribution selectively concerns youth from the working class belonging to ethnora-
cial minorities and living in public housing. This is why the subjective approach
does not suffice to grasp the broader meaning of police abuse not as mere oppres-
sion or reprisal but also as punishment.

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 The Political Context of Policing Excesses The Police Are
the Punishment
Indeed, on the objective side, the institution, the state, and, in the end, society
as a whole participate in this idea that the police should be part of the puni-
tive apparatus. Since the 1970s, the discourse of law and order has progressively
swamped the public sphere and the political realm in France. The historic victory
of the left in the general elections of 1981, after twenty-­three years of conservative
domination, led to the restructuring of the French political landscape, with the
rapid rise of the far right and the weakening of the traditional right. The National
Front based its success principally on two issues, immigration and security, often
mingling them by presenting immigrants or their children as the major source
of insecurity (Albertini and Doucet 2013). The response of conservatives was to
radicalize their discourse, in their turn adopting xenophobic themes and produc-
ing alarmist statements. Two men, both ministers of the interior, were pivotal in
this process: Charles Pasqua in the 1990s and Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2000s, the
former having been the political mentor of the latter, who is remembered for hav-
ing promised to “cleanse” the housing projects and having described their youths
as “scum” — this was just before the 2005 riots. In hindsight, this strategy paid
off in terms of electoral successes in the following three decades. In this context,
the police benefited from expanded human and technical resources, with new so-­
called nonlethal but definitely maiming weapons such as Flash-­balls and Tasers;
special units, the anticrime squads in particular, were created in an increasing
number of urban districts; and new prerogatives, notably in terms of stop and frisk
as well as use of firearms, were added in the code of criminal procedure.
These policies were not meant to be implemented everywhere toward everyone.
The banlieues with their housing projects were their main focus. Their residents,
especially the working-­class youth belonging to ethnic minorities, were their prin-
cipal target. One night, as we were cruising in the city center, the sergeant major
recognized an Arab man in his thirties in the street. Since his men had arrested
him several weeks before, he manifested his surprise, but was told by his col-
league that the man had received a suspended prison sentence: “Don’t worry,
he’ll get it! We will have no problem finding something to make him break his
suspension order. I tell you: he’ll serve his time.” Indeed, their interactions with
these publics included various forms of provocation, either verbal, via racist slurs,
or physical, via harsh treatment during stop and frisk. Such harassment sometimes
led to responses from the youths who, under pressure, either talked back to the law
enforcement agents or pushed them back, thus opening the way to the accusation
of insulting an officer and resisting arrest.

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 Public Culture This offense, which, as the officers themselves and their superiors admitted to
me, was viewed as a situation much more revealing of police misconduct rather
than of youth misbehavior, has skyrocketed in the past two decades. The institu-
tion has forcefully backed this practice as the Ministry of the Interior has encour-
aged its agents to file complaints and request financial compensation from the
accused, even paying the fees of the officers’ lawyers and requesting severity
from prosecutors. One evening, in a conversation at the station, a young officer
explained to his colleagues that he had found a decree, dating to the time when
tuberculosis was endemic in the first half of the twentieth century, that imposed
a fine for spitting in a public place. Excited at the idea of reviving this offense,
he sardonically declared: “It’s great. If I see anyone spitting, I slap a charge on
him and with a bit of luck it’ll end with resisting the police!” The agents never ran
out of imagination in that regard. They knew they would be supported by their
institution.
These punitive policies and practices of law enforcement selectively oriented
against ethnoracial minorities evoke the punitive law enforcement policies and
practices toward colonial subjects, in particular Algerians residing in France
(Blanchard 2011). From 1925 to 1945, the North African Brigade of the Prefec-
ture of Police exercised strict control of the Algerian population living in the
metropole. It was part of the Service for the Surveillance and Protection of North
African Natives, the actual work of which had more to do with surveillance than
protection. The activity of the brigade was indeed mostly devoted to monitoring
and suppressing nationalist aspirations, deviant acts, and even the simple fact of
residing in the metropole. Accused of racism and violence as well as of complic-
ity with the German occupier, the infamous unit was dissolved after the Second
World War. Two factors played a major role in the aftermath of this conflict. The
first one, on May 8, 1945, was the brutal repression of the riots of Sétif, Guelma,
and Kherrata that broke out after the killing of a young man by the police dur-
ing a demonstration celebrating the liberation of Paris (the massacre of several
thousands of Algerians fueled the independence sentiment that later led to the
insurrection against the colonial power). The second one, on September 20, 1947,
was the enactment of a new statute for Algerians who were no longer “natives” but
“French Muslims” (although a legal improvement, this statute gave them rights
that were distinct from those of the “French non-­Muslims” who resided in Algeria,
making them second-­class citizens). The two elements were linked, as the new
statute was a concession after the massacres, but they revealed the increasing
predicament that the French government was facing with its colonial subjects.

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 In this context, the political and social tensions were exacerbated in the metro- The Police Are
pole, and a special police unit called the Anti-­Assault and Violence Brigade was the Punishment
created in 1953 after the deadly repression of a demonstration on the fourteenth of
July in Paris. Composed of members of the earlier-­dissolved brigade, it extensively
and brutally practiced checks and searches, raids and arrests. Rather than con-
taining crime as its mission was supposed to be, it punished not only the political
activity but also the mere presence of a population often described as “unde-
sirable.” The culmination of this repression was the massacre that occurred on
October 17, 1961, in Paris when thousands of peaceful Algerian demonstrators
defying the curfew were arrested and kept in custody in an arena and a stadium
while hundreds of others were thrown and drowned in the river Seine.4 The prefect
of the Paris police in command of this operation at the time was Maurice Papon,
who had been responsible, as head of Bordeaux’s police, for the deportation of
hundreds of Jews to concentration camps during the Second World War and, as
prefect of the Constantinois, for the torture of prisoners during the Algerian War.
Although it would be incorrect to establish a direct link between yesterday’s
Anti-­Assault and Violence Brigade and today’s anticrime squads, and more gener-
ally between police practices toward the so-­called natives in the colonial period
and toward the ethnoracial minorities in the present time, one cannot deny the
existence of a pattern and a genealogy. A pattern, with the creation of special
units with extended prerogatives, the targeting of populations and territories more
than individuals, the discriminatory treatment of stigmatized groups, the abuses
endorsed by the government, the mode of surveillance and intervention. And
a genealogy, explicitly referred to by the sergeant’s rallying cry in the episode
evoked at the beginning, implied in the injunction and insults of the motorcycle
officer, and more broadly present in the language commonly used by the police
to speak of their public designated as “savages” or “apes” whose neighborhood
was called a “jungle,” as well as in the countersubversive strategies employed by
officials for the control of riots.

The Banality of Extrajudicial Retribution

In light of the subjective and objective elements gathered to interpret the meaning
of police violence, it is clear that it has multiple dimensions of retorsion, repres-

4. The exact number of deaths has never been acknowledged by the French state. According to
Jean-­Luc Einaudi (2001), 200 people died that night, while another 325 were killed by the police
during the autumn of 1961.

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 Public Culture sion, domination, and retribution, but that the latter occupies a central role as jus-
tification both at the level of the officers, who consider themselves to be entitled
to dispense justice on the street or at the station, and at the level of the institution
and the state, which protect them from legal actions and even facilitate judicial
retaliation. Crime or even suspicion of crime is not even necessary when the mere
presence of certain groups is deemed dubious or simply undesirable.
Apprehending police violence as a form of punishment has two important theo-
retical implications. First, rather than attempting to verify that facts match the
definition, one should strive to adapt the latter to the former. Here, the meaning
that the agents give to their acts and the analysis that one can make of what under-
lies them lead one to contest the criteria proposed by normative theorists. When a
reality does not fit its definition, it is the definition that should be revised. Second,
while it is conceptually relevant to try to separate definition from justification, as
these scholars do, it is empirically difficult as well as politically problematic to do
so. Officers and their institution do need arguments, albeit fallacious, to legitimize
what would otherwise appear as deviance. It is not the task of the social scientist
to help them in this endeavor. Both these theoretical implications were implicit in
Hart’s critique of the definitional stop.
Putting together the various pieces of the puzzle in light of the classical defini-
tion of punishment, one can see that such police operations are conducted by a
legal institution that is not designed to punish but considers itself entitled and is
incited by public authorities to do so; that the offenses sanctioned do not match
the initial motive of the intervention and can even be fabricated so as to neutralize
potential complaints; that in the absence of an identifiable or suspicious offender,
retribution can translate into punitive expedition or random punishment; and that
extralegal forms such as physical and moral abuse are adopted.
What I have analyzed about France is in no way specific. In recent years, law
enforcement agencies have increasingly appeared, in various parts of the globe,
as suppliers of extrajudicial punishment. In Brazil, human rights organizations
calculated that more than five thousand people were killed by the police between
2005 and 2014 in Rio de Janeiro as part of the so-­called pacification of the fave-
las. In the Philippines, official statistics reveal that just within the months of July
and August 2016 more than eighteen hundred suspects were shot dead, includ-
ing seven hundred by the police, as a result of the war on drugs declared by the
newly elected president. In the United States, 1,134 deaths caused by the police
were registered in 2015, that is, forty times more than those by capital punish-
ment during the same period, and remarkably, the socioracial profile of victims is

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 similar.5 The local interpretation of these homicides as extrajudiciary punish- The Police Are
ments varies according to the context: in some cases, the statements made by the Punishment
politicians and the positive reactions from part of the population leave no doubt
about the existence of what is often called penal populism; in others, the support
of these practices by the authorities, their facilitation by the institution, the impu-
nity they benefit from, and the complacent silence that accompanies them reveal
latent or veiled expressions of this populism.
However, the punitive function of law enforcement should not be reduced to
these extreme manifestations. On a daily basis, for many belonging to the most
vulnerable groups, it translates into harassment, provocations, humiliations, rac-
ist slurs, undue stops, unjustified searches, abusive fines, painful handcuffing,
groundless arrests, arbitrary custody, blows leaving no traces, and sometimes even
torture — all forms of mistreatment that must be accepted without flinching, since
any form of response or rebellion would immediately be punished physically and
legally. If the Black Lives Matter movement started with the killings of African
Americans by the police in the United States, it soon extended its denunciation to
the ordinary forms of oppression of ethnoracial minorities rendered invisible to
the mainstream population.
The trivialization and normalization of extrajudiciary punishment by the police
are a major unrecognized fact in contemporary societies. In fact, this very trivi-
alization and normalization as a form of punishment could even be deemed part
of the judicial system. In the same way that the immense majority of people who
are indicted are not sentenced in court by a judge or a jury but accept plea bar-
gaining even if they are innocent, the immense majority of people from certain
groups who have interactions with the police are punished in the street or at the
precinct even when they are not guilty. The informal and even illegal judicial
system is thus much more extended than the formal and legal one. But the two are
not separated. By arresting people and handing them over to the prosecutor, that
is, by selecting whom they decide to arrest under their discretionary power and
by forging accusations to conceal their own misbehavior, the police participate in
the judicial system, which, by giving precedence to the word of sworn-­in officers
over the word of suspects, grants them legitimacy.

5. Sources for these statistics are to be found in the following documents and articles: Anis-
tia Internacional Brasil 2015; Lema 2016; Guardian 2015; Death Penalty Information Center 2019;
Karabel 2014.

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 Public Culture Beyond Philosophical Justifications

But why would the police punish? And why would society expect from them that
they play this role?6 Two theories of justification prevail in philosophical and
legal literature. For utilitarians, following Jeremy Bentham, only consequences
that punishment may have for society should be taken into account. It should
therefore be justified if it contributes to a decline in crime either by incapacitat-
ing the criminal, by rehabilitating him, by deterring future crime, or by combin-
ing the three. For retributivists, after Immanuel Kant, only the act that has been
committed should be taken into account, punishment being just deserts. It should
only be justified if it causes pain to the offender so as to pay for his offense in a
degree equivalent to the suffering he has caused. Focused on reducing crime, the
utilitarians look toward the future. Concentrated on the atonement of the offense,
the retributivists are mainly oriented toward the past. Is one of these justifications
applicable in the case of the police?
Let us examine one of the various similar interactions that I witnessed or heard
about during my fieldwork. Three adolescents are talking and laughing joyously in
a small square near the hostel of the youth protection service where they stay. Like
the other minors residing in the three-­floor house, they have been placed in this
institution by a juvenile judge either because they have committed a misdemeanor
or because they are deemed endangered. The three teenagers are of African ori-
gin. Two police officers on patrol stop by and ask for their papers. Such a check
is banal but illegal, since there is no indication of a crime being or having been
committed and since it is moreover established that such a stop is often based on
racial profiling. The adolescents present their travel passes, which are normally
regarded as sufficient since it has their name and photograph. Not satisfied, the
agents demand their identification cards. The adolescents, who do not have the
documents with them, explain that they live in the hostel some fifty yards away
and propose the officers accompany them to fetch them. The police ruthlessly
refuse and threaten to take them into the precinct for further verification. Pan-
icked at this prospect, one of the teenagers escapes, runs to his lodging, takes the
requested card and swiftly returns to prove his good faith. But the reception is not
what he expects. The officers scold him harshly, using racist slurs while slapping
him. Alerted by the shouting, one of the social workers of the service comes out,
only to hear one of the officers viciously threaten the boy: “I’m going to kneecap
you!” and hurtfully yell at him: “You’re a failure in your family! You’re a failure

6. The discussion of the justifications for punishment and the presentation of the anecdote are
developed in more detail in my Berkeley Tanner Lectures published as The Will to Punish (2018).

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 at school! You, little faggot!” Not without difficulty, the social worker interposes The Police Are
herself and finally manages to bring the adolescent back to the hostel. There, with the Punishment
the director of the institution, she tries to convince him to file a complaint against
the agent, telling him how important it is to defend his rights. Still shaken and
distressed by the aggressive and humiliating handling he just endured, the teen-
ager keeps repeating in a low voice that it does not matter. Obviously, he knows
how much weight the word of a black minor under the care of a youth protection
service would carry when confronted with the word of two officers, how easily
his complaint could be reversed into a case against him for insulting an officer and
resisting arrest, and in the end how costly it could be to try to assert his rights. He
impatiently returns to his room.
How to interpret this scene? Added to the socially and racially grounded hos-
tility, which is commonly expressed in words and acts by the police toward ado-
lescents with this profile, is in this case a moral aspect. Being under the supervi-
sion of the judicial institution, the teenagers have already had dealings with the
penal system, either as delinquents or as victims or, more often than not, as both.
Although the agents pretend to ignore that the boys live in the hostel, as they refuse
to let them fetch their identity cards there, they evidently know where they come
from, imagine what may have been their history, and mistreat them accordingly:
hence the hassle about the documents, the threat to arrest them, the nasty com-
ments, the slaps. It is hardly imaginable that such a scene could have happened in
a residential area, for the simple reason that, as the head of the anticrime squad
unit told me, they never went there, except in the very rare cases when a crime had
been committed. Their activity was limited to certain territories and populations.
In the present incident, the level of violence is all the more remarkable in that
there has been no wrongdoing: only messing around in a public space. In fact, the
officers punish the adolescents not because of what they do but because of what
they are or represent: lower-­class black boys of migrant origin, moreover with
probable dealings with the judicial system. This combination of social, racial,
and moral attributes is sufficient to presume their culpability, or at least to assume
that they deserve a lesson. The psychological harassment and physical abuse do
not only allow the police to exert and display their discretionary power. They also
serve to inculcate a hierarchical order, as the youths learn, through the repetition
of such experiences, their inferior social, racial, and moral position. Neither the
justifications proposed by philosophers and legal theorists nor the justifications
provided by the police suffice to account for the scene. In the absence of offense
committed, it is difficult to resort to the utilitarian and retributivist arguments, in
a strict sense, to justify the punishment.

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 Public Culture Even if the officers pretend that they are strictly enforcing the law by verify-
ing the identity of individuals in public spaces and teaching them to abide by the
rules, it is difficult to justify the verbal and physical violence in the interaction.
One must resort to a more general interpretation considering the function that they
are assigned by society, which consists in using their discretionary power to call
to social order the purportedly dangerous classes. The adolescent understood it,
and this is why, for him, it made no sense to file a complaint. With whom? With
the very institution whose members harass him? To be adjudicated by whom? By a
justice system in which the word of young men of color has no weight against the
word of sworn-­in officers? Schooled by an already long experience of interaction
with law enforcement, the adolescent knew that he was “police property,” in John
Alan Lee’s (1981: 53) words.
Yet, the analysis must go further. Rationality — that provided by the law, that
offered by officers, that elaborated by social scientists — does not exhaust the rea-
sons the police punish as they do. Indeed, as one can see in the case of this adoles-
cent, punishment is always in excess of what it is supposed to be. But why is it the
case? Why would officers purposely put handcuffs incorrectly on to suspects they
have arrested so as to painfully twist their arms and make fun of their complaint
while taking them into the precinct for questioning, sometimes causing nerve
compression that can be irreversible? Why would they take them into custody in
filthy and cold rooms without letting them go to the toilets, have something to eat,
or even sometimes take their medicine? Why would they intentionally drive their
vehicle in a rough way when they extradite prisoners to a faraway jurisdiction so
as to have them bang around or get car sick? Why would they debase them with
offensive remarks and threaten them with dismaying prospects? In the act of pun-
ishing, something resists rational analysis or, better said, resists being analyzed
as rational. There is almost inexorably an emotional dimension, which Friedrich
Nietzsche (1989: 5) describes as “the voluptuous pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le
plaisir de le faire’, the enjoyment of violation.” To punish is to produce a gratu-
itous suffering, which adds to the retribution, for the mere satisfaction of knowing
that the culprit — or the one presumed such — suffers. In the assimilation of pun-
ishment with pain and, even more, in the unnecessary torment that is added to it,
one cannot not recognize the expression of cruelty.

Conclusion

On February 2, 2017, in a housing project outside Paris, a twenty-­two-­year-­old

local educator of Congolese origin was violently arrested for having interfered

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 with the brutal stop and frisk of three of his friends who were simply hanging The Police Are
around in his neighborhood.7 As he was resisting the handcuffing, he was pushed the Punishment
against a wall and hit from behind by one of the officers with an expandable
baton. The blow caused a tear of the sphincter muscle of the anus, a four-­inch-­
deep wound of the rectum, and a perforation of the intestine. The prosecutor
opened a criminal investigation for “voluntary violence,” and the investigat-
ing judge indicted the guilty officer for “rape.” Police experts tried, however, to
explain that the gesture was part of normal police practice “to create a physical
destabilization and bring the recalcitrant under control.” One year later, not being
able to defecate, the young man still had a colostomy with a plastic bag to collect
his waste. In the meantime, one learned that the commissioner of the same district
had received a six-­month suspended prison sentence for not having stopped one
of his agents who was threatening to sodomize a man with a hubcap, and that in
a neighboring town an officer was indicted for having caused with his baton a
one-­inch-­long anal wound to an inebriated young man as he was pushing him into
the police car whose back seat had been folded down so as to force him to bend
forward as he was handcuffed.
There seems to be in these cases a common pattern of humiliation of young
men, especially of color, through the negation of their masculinity by these spe-
cific forms of violence. In this sense, they can neither be reduced to deviant acts
of sadistic officers nor interpreted as mere techniques of control. It is part and par-
cel of retribution. In fact, following Everett Hughes’s (1962) disturbing but lucid
observation, one can say that society delegates to certain institutions and profes-
sions, notably the police, the dirty work of punishing with the implicit permission
to exceed the moral and legal limits of punishment.

References

Albertini, Dominique, and David Doucet. 2013. Histoire du Front National.

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Anistia Internacional Brasil. 2015. You Killed My Son: Homicides by Military
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Bittner, Egon. 1980. The Functions of the Police in Modern Society. Cambridge,
MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain.

7. The so-­called Théo Affair and its developments are discussed in various articles, including in
Pascual 2018. The sentencing of the commissioner is described in Le Monde 2017. The little publi-
cized case of the other young man wounded by an officer can be read in Saviana 2018.

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Didier Fassin is James D. Wolfensohn Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and
Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Anthropologist,
sociologist, and physician, he has conducted research in Senegal, South Africa, Ecuador,
and France. Author of sixteen books, he was awarded a gold medal in anthropology at
the Swedish Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016, and in 2018 he was the first
social scientist to receive the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award. His current work is
on crises, their construction, their meaning, and the responses they generate.

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