Without menace, without weapon, shot at point-blank range
On June 27, in Nanterre, at 8 h 15 in the morning, during a police car check for refusal to comply, the young Nahel M., 17 years old, is shot by a motorcyclist policeman of the department of public order and traffic of the Police Headquarters of Paris. Legitimate defence “facing a vehicle rushing upon constables with the intent to strike them,” invoked by the policemen involved is immediately taken up by some medias that are prompt to denounce petty delinquency but hide, indeed even flatter, that of the rich and powerful (CNews, Europe 1, BFM-TV, etc.).
But a video recording rapidly discloses the lie. It shows two policemen leaning on the door, on the driver’s side, of a stationary yellow car in a narrow one-way street. Despite the background urban noise, threats are easily perceptible: “You are going to be shot in the head”, the policeman shouts, still holding his handgun a few centimeters from Nahel. The car restarts and the shots are fired at close range, causing the driver’s death, and the car crashed a few meters away against a traffic sign.
On June 29 in Nanterre, a powerful demonstration denounces the crime. In this city, as well as in all the big cities in the country, the uprising is huge, with the youth in the proletarian areas, which mainly include migrant workers and their descendants, and where misery and small traffic are concentrated. It attacks police stations and cops, but it also attacks local inhabitants’ cars and public facilities, out of powerlessness and desperation. Helicopters and drones patrol every night, which creates an atmosphere of civil war. Early on June 28, the Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin judges the images recorded on video “extremely shocking”.
The PCF, PS and LFI MPs align with the Macronists at the Assembly
EELV “admits that the police officers wage a difficult and dangerous action all over the country” but it faults the shot abuse for refusal to comply. The parties who complained the officers during the movement on defense of the retirement pensions are supporting police more than ever: “This does not weaken our support to the policemen” (Ciotti, RMC, June 28). “As for me, I support the presumption of self-defence for the police forces” (Le Pen, BFMTV, June 28).
In an attempt to prevent the uprising in the popular areas, the president admits that the policeman’s act was “inexplicable, inexcusable” (Macron, June 28), and all the MPs, except those from the RN, take up the invitation from the Renaissance president of the National Assembly to observe a minute’s silence. What a hypocrisy to commune with the LIOT, LR and Renaissance MPs who called for destroying the slums in Mayotte, with the ministers who were here, while the Macron-Borne-Darmanin is primary responsible for the police violence.
With Macron, the fiscal austerity does not apply to the police, to the justice and to the army, the repressive state machinery recruits and gears up. Under Macron and Darmanin, decivilization is the rule: humiliation of high school students on Mantes-la-Jolie in 2018, 5 hands torn off and 23 people one-eye blinded among the yellow jackets in 2018, attacks on union parades in the big workers’ movements in 2016, 2019, 2023, 2 ecologist activists dead in 2014 and 2023… Deaths for “refusal to comply” proliferate, 13 just in 2022.
Improving the republican police?
The PS “does not want to overburden an institution which, in most cases, fulfills its duty in the best fashion possible” (June 28). LFI asks for “a deep reform of the way the national police is organized” (June 28). The PCF wants a “republican police close to the citizens, which serves their expectations and needs” (June 29).
Crocodile tears! As part of the exploiter’s State, the police has always been used against the workers and the oppressed, it has invariably repressed the strikes and workers’ demonstrations. On an historical basis, it rounded up the Jews for the Nazi occupier, it slaughtered the Algerian workers under De Gaulle.
When they rule, the reformist parties systematically reinforce the police and the standing army. In 2017, the Hollande-Cazeneuve government expanded the situation where the law enforcement officers are allowed to open fire.
The social imperialist parties sow fatal illusions on the “Republican police” because, in the final analysis, the advocate French capitalism and the bourgeois order. They are not much preoccupied with the recent budget increase for the imperialist army. The union’s leaderships pretend that the policemen and constable are “ordinary workers”, they unionize the cops and defend their “demands” which precisely include the right to kill. Their so-called Trotskyite adjuncts do not advocate self-defense. LO often asked for more cops and supported the cops’ movements.
Yet, the police and the standing army are nothing but armed gangs in the service of capital, their members get an early retirement, and they are overpaid comparing to workers with similar qualification. They are separated from the rest of society who is unarmed.
In all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic, the police (like the standing army) is the chief instrument of oppression of the masses… Separated as it is from the people, forming a professional caste of men trained in the practice of violence upon the poor, men who receive somewhat higher pay and the privileges that go with authority (to say nothing of “gratuities”), the police everywhere, in every republic, however democratic, where the bourgeoisie is in power, always remains the unfailing weapon, the chief support and protection of the bourgeoisie. (Lenin, They Have Forgotten the Main Thing, May 1918)
Workers’ United front for the workers’ self-defense and for people’s armament
Attacks against the firemen, deterioration of bus shelters, of schools, of media libraries, of bus, of tramways, of post offices, of workers’ cars, of shops, of bank branches… cannot be an effective response against the police abuse, and they unintentionally serve the police, the government, the racist bourgeois parties and the fascist groups.
The movement’s leadership must move from the declassed (who destroy for fun and steal) to the proletariat (who fights for social justice). The workers who protect their kids’ schools set an example. Having justice for Nahel and for all the victims of the State’s police implies to get organized for self-defence. Organs for protection and monitoring are to be constituted in every area. Police kills, and the law gives it more and more power. It must be countered with the means of the organization. Constituting self-defence people’s groups in popular areas will allow the youth to ask for justice, to face the police order and to get conscious of its rights and to demand others.
Against the violence of the police and of the fascist thugs (always related to the police and to the army) who do not cease increasing in France against the workers, against the youth, against the migrants… the workers’ unions and the parties originating from the working class must unite for defending the demonstrations, the youth, migrants, the strikes, the popular neighborhoods, in order to preserve their lives, to forbade repression and to denounce police impunity.
Only people’s armament and the workers’ taking power will definitely put the capital armed gangs’ away. But as for now, the responsibility of the workers’ movement is to organize in every city a powerful demonstration against the police violence and murders, with the following catchwords: Disarmament of the police! Down the Down with the Macron-Darmanin government! Workers’ government!