The incident in which a police officer killed and wounded the resident of Paris’s suburb of Nanterre seventeen-year-old Nahel M. The incident triggered an upsurge of protests throughout France which was a rerun of similar protests triggered by teenagers living in housing developments more than two decades ago. Millions of euros of investment in the past few years have not helped to ease outrage over police abuse and the poor living conditions of France’s housing developments.

“Death to the cops” written on a structure located in Nanterre, a Paris suburban area Nanterre on the 29th of 

The majority of them are located in areas of suburbs ( banlieues) situated on the outskirts large city centers, France’s public housing projects house large numbers of young people – 40% of whom are younger than 25 years old – typically immigrants and who are in constant fight for acceptance within French society.

The data are alarming. Children from economically challenged communities are an ” particularly frequent target” for discrimination by police. police including stop-and-search searches, “even when there is no sign or evidence of wrongdoing”, Human Rights Watch has found.

It is less likely that they will quit school at the age of 18 with an education beyond Baccalaureat The youth living within QPVs, or quartiers Prioritaires (QPVs) that are slated for urban renewal, enjoy an average of 54% success rate as compared to 77% of the students who succeed in other areas in 2013, according to an research from the year 2013. report.

These are twice more probable to be in a jobless situation and are less likely into university programs, apprenticeships or work-training programs.

The stigmatisation can be felt from the beginning. “The youngsters we work with exhibit an tendency to undervalue themselves. We have observed a low confidence in their academic capabilities and their personal strengths,” says Mona Amirouche the general director of Banlieues School, an organisation which aims to help students as well as teachers and parents who live in housing developments that are public.

It is partly due to the ingrained perception of “stereotypes and prejudices linked to their social background”, Amirouche states. This is due to the fact that even in their teens they are in their favour. “They are in the middle of physical development and are trying to find their own way with the resources they have,” she says.

“All the issues of contemporary France’

In general, French housing projects are communities built during the postwar boom in during the 50s, 1960s. typically constructed with inferior materials in areas that were not equipped with infrastructure, such as transportation, shops and businesses. “This frequently left inhabitants cut off from the commercial and cultural centres of the cities they lived in,” says Emile Chabal, a specialist in modern French political and historical studies in the University of Edinburgh.

A pedestrian walks past burnt cars at the Pablo Picasso housing estate in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris, on June 29, 2023. Bertrand Guay, AFP

As economic growth slows in the 1980s, many residents did not have the opportunity to improve their prospects or move into better-off neighbourhoods. “This created intergenerational poverty, often amplified by racial discrimination, as the inhabitants of these neighbourhoods have become increasingly ethnically diverse,” Chabal states.

French law bans the collection of data about the ethnicity of the population. However, the think tanks and NGOs have repeatedly found they have found that “racial discrimination is a reality in French society”, declared Julien Talpin, a political scientist who studies neighborhoods with a poor reputation at the national centre for research in science (CNRS) in an interview on this morning on FRANCE 24.

A Open Society Justice Initiative study in 2009 revealed there were policemen in Paris sometimes have to stop Black and Arab individuals due to the ethnicity of their dress instead of based on the behavior of an individual.

Read more Teen’s murder brings up a French problem with police that cannot not be identified

A study conducted in 2019 of nine countries from Europe as well as North America found that, in the hiring process, France had the most discrimination against non-White people of any country that was studied which included those from the US, UK, Canada and Germany.

In housing developments the social problems are rampant within isolated communities with the highest rates of poverty as well as racial discrimination.

“These neighbourhoods concentrate all of the problems of contemporary France: very high unemployment, low school attainment, discrimination of various kinds, and unstable family and social life,” Chabal declares.

“The rise of petty crime and drug trafficking has not helped – nor has an excess of police violence, almost always with strong racial undertones.”

‘Political will’

Three weeks of riots throughout France in 2005 – sparked by the residents of housing communities that are public – saw the declaration of a state-of-emergency in which over 11,000 vehicles were burnt and 233 public structures were damaged. The riots began following the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore two teenagers returning home after having played football at Clichy-sur-Bois, a Paris area of Clichy-sur-Bois after they fled the police and perished trying to escape into an electrical substation.

The riots began in 2017 as a the wake of the reports of police who brutally assaulted 22-year-old local teacher Theodore Luhaka with a police baton during a stop and search operation in Aulnay-sous-Bois an additional Paris suburb.

The police shooting that killed Nahel on the 27th of June was followed by a rioting week that saw a plethora of people detained by police, a lot of whom were teenagers. They might not have been involved in the previous riots but they have likely experience an “intergenerational memory” of racist violence and racialised police, Chabal says. “Each new cycle of violence [becomes] more intense, as children avenge not just the injustices committed against them but also the injustices committed against those who came before them.”

Local communities are lacking solutions to end the anger. “Social workers, educators and community organisations are lacking the funds to actually offer positive and more constructive outlet for the anger that we’ve been seeing in the last week,” Talpin stated.

Following the riots in 2005, in particular hundreds of millions of money have been funneled into France’s QPVs in order to reverse the decline of cities and tackle persistent social problems.

The majority of funding was allocated to physical improvements like better housing or building new facilities like libraries, and expanding transportation links. This is crucial, according to Talpin. “But not enough money was spent on the social aspect,” Talpin says.

Residents have requested services like close proximity (or community) police work, Talpin said. “Officers that are, on a daily basis, in these neighbourhoods and can actually build trust with the residents.”

However, some believe that the changes they’ve witnessed are “window dressing that has not brought real results or tackled the structural issues”, Chabal states. “Most of the socioeconomic metrics of the urban renewal zones have remained flat or got worse since the 1990s.”

The rate of unemployment, the success rate in education, and the levels of poverty have all been unable to improve.

“The problem right now is not so much about the evidence of these problems,” Talpin stated. “It’s about the political will to actually tackle them.”

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