All Souls Blog: Contesting Racialized Policing in France: How Activists Challenge the Epistemic Power of the Police

The Puzzle

Dr Boutros began by setting the contextual backdrop, describing the events of October 2005, which sparked urban uprisings across the banlieues of Paris: while hiding from the police, Zyed Benna (aged 17) and Bouna Traoré (aged 15) were electrocuted in a substation in Clichy-sous-Bois. Dr Boutros highlighted the narrative pushed by the media and politicians at the time which portrayed the unrest as aimless violence and upheld the police account of the events which denied that they had ever been in pursuit of the two boys. Moving into more recent history, Dr Boutros described how the death of Nahel Merzouk during a police traffic stop in 2023 galvanised a new wave of uprisings in Paris. In 2005, the credibility of the police had been leveraged to reframe the issue. Nearly 20 years on, Dr Boutros observed a distinctive shift within mainstream media discourse, challenging this assumed credibility and trustworthiness.

These two events presented Dr Boutros with a puzzle: How could it be that, despite its salience since the 1970s, the issue of racialised policing was not acknowledged within political and media coverage of the 2005 uprisings? What did it take for activists to move this issue onto the political and media agenda in 2023?

The Epistemic Power of Police

In beginning to piece together this puzzle, Dr Boutros revisited existing scholarship in Social Movement Theory, Policing Studies, and Critical Race Theory, drawing three preliminary conclusions. Firstly, she found that despite the prevalence of social movements against police violence in France since the 1970s, their effectiveness was hindered by internal divisions, challenges in fostering alliances, and constraints on resources. Secondly, contesting policing was challenging due to the police monopoly over the production of data and privileged access to the media. Finally, given that France operates within a ‘race-blind’ ideology, anti-racist movements struggle to gain traction.

Dr Boutros introduced a dimension of police power that went beyond existing accounts of the police’s coercive and symbolic power. She called this epistemic power which she conceptualized as the police's capacity ‘to control what is known and what remains unknown (and sometimes, unknowable) about policing practices’ (See Boutros). This epistemic power of the police, she elaborated, derives from three sources: their control over the production of policing and crime data, their established position within the ‘hierarchy of credibility’, and their privileged access to mainstream media (See Boutros).

Knowledge Production as a Site of Contention

Dr Boutros then recounted her ethnographic research with three activist coalitions between 2016 and 2018: NGO-led national campaigns against racial profiling, neighborhood mobilisations against police harassment, and the families of victims organising for Truth & Justice. She set out to explore the epistemic power struggle between these social movements and police, exploring how activists' different epistemological approaches can influence media, political, and judicial discourse around racialised policing.

Dr Boutros drew on her work with the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) and the developments following their 2009 report which quantified racial disparities in police stops in France. This report was the first of its kind to collect police data that accounted for race and could offer a credible, statistics-based picture of reality, difficult for politicians to refute. While Dr Boutros described this as a success, she acknowledged how the narrow scope of this methodological approach could not capture the drivers of inequality. The issue of racialised policing was quickly reduced within political debates to one of ‘biased individual officers’, undermining advocacy for wider institutional reforms and obscuring the issue of discriminatory police practices within ‘sensitive areas’.

Dr Boutros offered a further example from her work with neighborhood mobilisations in Reuilly-Montgallet. In this residential area, Youth Counsellors had mobilised to alert the police about the experiences of young people subject to oppressive policing in the area. Building local coalitions and taking a grounded epistemological approach – relying on oral testimony, sousveillance, and medical records – the neighborhood mobilisation was able to expose the routine nature of racialised policing; an issue deeply embedded within local conflicts over public space in a largely gentrified area. As Dr Boutros outlined, this qualitative data was used to inform a series of collective lawsuits. Following a collective criminal complaint launched in 2015, an investigation uncovered an institutional police policy of ‘evicting undesirables’. This new evidence was used to expand the legal claims within a criminal lawsuit in 2018, condemning the discriminatory nature of police practices and policies. Although three police officers were initially convicted, the decisions were overturned on appeal. A subsequent civil suit in 2020 found the state to be at ‘grievous fault’ for three of the thirteen discriminatory stops evidenced, but the court did not accept that they had been conducted based on the policy of ‘evicting undesirables’. Moreover, the young men who had supplied evidence against the police were convicted of defamation and ordered to pay damages to the officers involved. Despite successfully exposing how systemic and institutionalised racialised policing is, these cases highlight the challenges of countering the epistemic power of the police and the lack of credibility attributed to victims and social activists. Furthermore, following the legal outcome, the retaliatory practices of the police compounded the harm experienced by young marginalised groups within the neighborhood, illustrating the limits of the law as a recourse.

These two examples provide an understanding of how knowledge production is a site of contention, involving a dynamic and continuous struggle over knowledge and ignorance. Recalling her introduction, Dr Boutros highlighted how, in 2005, the police monopoly over data production, unchallenged credibility, and domination of media narratives made it extremely challenging for social movements to counter their epistemic power. But as these examples show, modes of knowledge production by activists have introduced new data, strategically using the law and challenging the credibility of the police to bring the issue of racialised policing onto the media and political agenda.

Conclusion and Future Directions

Dr Boutros concluded her talk by reaffirming the need to reflect on the epistemic power of the police, offering a significant contribution to understanding the mechanisms through which police obscure oppression and violent practices from public view. However, reflecting on how knowledge production is a site of contention, Dr Boutros encourages us to attend to epistemic power struggles between the police and social movements. By examining the way social movements produce knowledge, her work helps further our understanding of the potential, and limits, of social activism. For activists and academics alike, Dr Boutros’ research offers important insight into what it takes for social movements to contest oppressive and violent policing.

Post By: Kaya Mercer, Georgia Moore and Georgia Williams, MSc Students, Oxford Centre for Criminology

How to cite this blog post (Harvard style):

K. Mercer, G. Moore and G. Williams. (2025) All Souls Blog: Contesting Racialized Policing in France: How Activists Challenge the Epistemic Power of the Police. Available at:https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/centre-criminology-blog/blog-post/2025/02/all-souls-blog-contesting-racialized-policing-france-how. Accessed on: 26/02/2025