On 24 November 2024, Martina Micciché reports in Valigia Blu, “Ramy Elgaml died in Milan in an accident that occurred after an eight-kilometre police chase involving the scooter that Elgami was travelling on with his friend, Fares Bouzidi. Elgami was 19 years old. He died in his neighbourhood, Corvetto, where there is now a memorial of photos and flowers next to a bedsheet painted with the words ‘Truth for Ramy'”. Elgami had refused to stop at a police checkpoint.
On the website of S.I.R. (Religious Information Service) Agency, Lorenzo Garbarino profiles Corvetto and what seem to be constant factors in such incidents: working-class urban districts, peripheries, exclusion, poverty, crime: “Redevelopment has long since run its course, and the concentration of material and cultural poverty, as well as the uprooting of the area, has led to a slow but steady degradation,” he writes.
On the same night that Ramy Elgami died, Micciché continues, “the first protest began, with burnt bins and clashes with the police. Others followed, recounted in the headlines along with the image of Corvetto literally on fire”.
The scene echoes others, already familiar: angry crowds in the urban and political periphery. It also echoes other deaths elsewhere in Europe.
In France, the latest to resonate in the press (though not chronologically the most recent) is that of Nahel Merzouk (17), killed on 27 June 2023 by a police officer, according to whom the car in which Merzouk was a front-seat passenger failed to stop at a checkpoint and rammed the officer, who opened fire in self-defence. This is at least the version of events that was initially picked up by the media.
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Video testimonies, however, are numerous, and show a murder: “Merzouk is yet another racialised teenager, the victim of a police force affected by systemic racism. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back for dozens of working-class neighbourhoods, neglected by public services and ostracised, whose young people are rebelling,” Tom Demars-Granja wrote in l’Humanité last October more than a year after the events.
Racial profiling, a hidden factor
For Micciché, “The protests [in Corvetto] speak of something much deeper than a banal refusal to stop at a checkpoint, starting with racial profiling.”
Micciché is echoed by L’Humanité (a former organ of the French Communist Party, now independent but still close to the party and the left), which recalls that “On 30 June 2023, the United Nations denounced systemic racism and the state’s continuous discriminatory practices. The French government replied on 8 July 2023: ‘Any accusation of racism or systemic discrimination by the police in France is unfounded’.”
Merzouk lived in the cité Pablo-Picasso in Nanterre, where (according to data from 2019) almost half of the inhabitants live below the poverty line.
Being a young (and young-looking) North African, Middle Eastern or African man in France exposes you to a 20 times higher risk of being checked by the police (data from 2017).
The independent media outlet Basta! has been reviewing deaths in police operations in France since 1977: “A profile of the victim emerges: a man under the age of 27, with an African or North African name, living in a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of a city like Paris, Lyon or Marseille.”
And elsewhere in Europe?
The intention here is not to list every incident, but rather paint a panorama of a structural problem.
Last September in Greece, Muhammad Kamran Ashiq, a 37-year-old Pakistani migrant, died in police custody. He was found with signs of violence on his body.
In July, only a few months earlier, after a visit to Greece, the Council of Europe’s Anti-Torture Committee wrote, as Human Right Watch reports: “We have again received several credible and consistent allegations of deliberate physical ill-treatment of foreign nationals detained by police officers at some police stations [Omonia and Kolonos] in Athens”.
The British association Inquest has published a report claiming that a black man is seven times more likely to die in detention than the rest of the population in the UK.
An investigation by Civio, conducted within the European Data Journalism Network, in which Voxeurop participates, tells us that beyond the total numbers (between 2020 and 2022, 488 people died in police custody or as a result of law enforcement operations in 13 EU countries), the victims are mainly migrants and people with mental disorders.
Again in Valigia Blu, Leonardo Bianchi writes:
“On 27 September 2024, the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the context of Law Enforcement issued a report after a visit to Italy on 2-10 May 2024. It states that the combination of criminalising drug policies and racial profiling raises “significant human rights concerns and disproportionately affects minorities and other vulnerable groups”. Akua Kuenyehia, chair of the expert panel, also stated that “racial bias, stereotypes and profiling create harmful and spurious associations of Blackness with criminality and delinquency”. A similar conclusion was reached by another report, published on 22 October 2024 and compiled by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), an independent, non-EU human rights body established by the Council of Europe”.
On 9 September, Mediendienst Integration, a German platform for immigration analysis, published the results of a study conducted by accompanying police officers in Lower Saxony during routine operations. Compared to previous studies on police racism in Germany, which focus on the attitudes or the behaviour of individual officers, Mediendienst’s study focuses on practices. The structure, rather than the individual. In daily work habits, in procedures, are there risks of more discrimination against certain groups of the population, structurally speaking? Spoiler alert: Yes.
The research team observed that identity checks carried out by the police mainly affect people who are (presumably) recognisable as migrants: young men in particular, people with left-wing political views, and young people perceived as Arab or Turkish. (The full research can be found here).
In 2011, a groundbreaking work for the analysis of law enforcement was published in France: La Force de l’ordre (“The Force of Order”, Seuil), by the anthropologist Didier Fassin. The book involved Fassin’s field investigation lasting almost two years (2005-2007) with a “BAC” (Brigade anti-criminalité, anti-crime brigade) in a Parisian suburb. Fassin explains what it means for a young man to be systematically stopped and checked, several times a day, sometimes by the same policemen, the arbitrary arrests, the disproportionality of the measures taken.
He also describes the boredom of the agents, and the pressure put on the institution to “make up the numbers” (at the end of the shift they literally go “on the prowl” for migrants). Thus, the banality of racism, and the influence of the political context.
