A Book Review: Enforcing Order By Didier Fassin

Book Review, Enforcing Order by Didier Fassin

Approaching the ongoing policing situation in Paris, which is similar to that of America, where police officers are portrayed as “racist pigs”, rather than people who are just simply trying to make the streets safe is not an easy task. Through his ethnographic work, Didier Fassin is able to portray an ethnographic study in one of the largest precincts in the Paris region. Fasin attempts to prove that police work isn’t simply enforcing the law; rather the police are engaged in the task of enforcing an unequal social order in the name of public security. In general, it seems that Fassin wants to explain how minorities, and low-income communities in the banlieues experience police work after events

By having first hand interactions with the police, he is able to deliver more efficient answers regarding policing in the Banlieues. One great example Fassin gives that might portray racist attitudes from the police, is one officer shouting, “we lost the Algerian war 40 years ago, we chickened out. Take no prisoners” (Fassin, 121). This by most would be seen as racist attitudes towards the ‘possibly’ immigrant people, although thanks to Fassin’s interactions with this officer, the reader is told that the officer “said it to lighten things up. It made everyone laugh”. This might simply seem as excuses, but because Fassin gets to learn their true stories, the officer goes on to tell him how he lives in a mostly Arab environment and has Arab family members, making it less likely for him to be genuinely racist. Another great example that Fassin provides, which illustrates the racism in policing is when “the cops stop three ‘elegantly dressed’ black men, who they had previously stopped. It is clear that these men are a higher class based on their clothing and the German Luxury car they are driving”(Fassin, 89). The racism comes when the cops say why they stopped them, “they’re not showing off no more now, the bastards”, making it clear that they were only stopped as pure harassment,

Fassin’s ethnographic work is a unique piece when it comes to observing and analyzing contemporary urban policing, since it goes deeper and to a more personal level than any demographic, sociological, or journalistic study would. Fassin is able to document the visible patterns of distribution of the different ethnicities throughout the Banllieues compared to how the majority of the police force is ethnically white, which a demographic study would be interested in observing. Moreover, Fassin is also able to capture the visible policies of segregation, stigmatization and, economic marginalization that a sociological piece would attempt to unearth. Lastly this ethnographic piece is more successful than journalism since, rather than purely reporting the facts and actions of the occurrences, it goes in depth into what it means for those involved, therefore humanizing the situation more than journalists would