Security for Whom?

Zineb Redouane could not have expected to be a victim. When a tear gas grenade fractured her face on December 1, 2018, she was in a fourth floor apartment in Marseille, closing the window to keep out the gas rising from the pell-mell of protests in the street below. The 80 year-old was chatting on the phone with her daughter in Algeria. It was just after 7pm. Outside, the city center ran hot with protesters’ anger, kindled by a confluence of issues that had led hundreds to spill into the streets. The gilets jaunes protest movement raged against President Emmanuel Macron and income inequality in France. Marseille’s residents were incensed at their local government’s neglect which had led to the collapse of two residential buildings one month earlier. Eight people had died.

Redouane’s daughter, Milfet, heard her cries through the phone when the grenade exploded in her face. A neighbor arrived. A friend called the fire department. “The police officer aimed at me. I saw him,” Redouane reportedly told her daughter. A day later, she died in the hospital.

More than two years later, Redouane’s face and name are on posters and street art throughout Marseille. As France debates a global security law that would enhance police power from local to national levels, her fate has come to symbolize the problem of police impunity in an increasingly militarized country. Macron's party has drawn on anti-immigrant fears in the wake of the 2015 Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris. In Marseille, one of the poorest cities in France, with a large immigrant population, Redouane’s case has become a rallying cry. “Zineb: Two Years Later, We Don’t Forget,” read banners at the head of a march against the proposed security law last December.

The investigation into her death, however, has proceeded slowly. The initial autopsy was ambiguous in naming the cause of Redouane’s death, suggesting her health problems might have significantly contributed, even though the grenade injury left her face and ribs fractured. The perpetrator has still not been identified: Although only five officers were manning tear gas that night, all of them denied definitively recognizing themselves in the grainy security camera footage showing a uniformed shooter firing in the direction of Redouane’s apartment. Two days after her death, a preliminary investigation was opened. As with all cases involving police officers, the investigation is being led by the General Inspection for the National Police (IGPN), the “police of the police” as they are colloquially known, who carry out investigations before passing them on to the legal authorities who decide whether to pursue the case further. Although the IGPN has no judicial authority on its cases, activists as well as politicians have expressed strong doubts about its neutrality as an investigative party. How can a police institution effectively investigate other police officers?

The IGPN effort to investigate Redouane’s case seemed minimal. According to Le Canard Enchaîné the IGPN initially emailed the police unit from that night to ask for the weapon that was used, but didn’t insist when the police responded that they needed it for a protest the following day, so the weapon was never examined. Several months into the case, the attorney general asked for the case to be moved from Marseille, after the local paper La Marseillaise reported that the assistant prosecutor of the city—the man who had initially been in charge of the investigation—had been present with the police unit the night of Redouane’s injury. The case was reassigned and moved to Lyon.

Redouane had lived for a long time in France on renewed residency permits, but was an Algerian citizen; in the last years of her life, she moved between Algiers and Marseille. After her death, her body was returned to her home country. In Algiers, authorities opened a separate investigation. There, an autopsy report directly attributed Redouane’s death to her injuries rather than to her poor health. Meanwhile, in France, allegations of a police cover-up emerged in the press: Le Parisien revealed that the IGPN had asked the local Centre for Urban Supervision (managed by municipal police) for footage from various security cameras from the day Redouane was shot. According to the IGPN, the one video camera filming Redouane’s street, located closest to where the shot was fired, happened to be off that day.

“In these kinds of cases, [without video evidence] we need counter-investigations,” said lawyer Brice Grazzini, who represents Zineb’s son in the investigation. “That happens through the media, through support committees, through ‘wild’ videos taken by people at the scene, on their phones.”

In many ways, Redouane’s case symbolizes the difficulty and agonizing futility of trying to investigate police violence. A ballistic report, finally released in May 2020, concluded that the weapon that had shot Redouane had been used “within the recommendations and employment procedures in place in the national police,” and that the shot had reached Redouane “in a totally accidental manner.” In other words, the shooter—still anonymous—was not at fault.

But in November, the French independent media outlet Disclose, which publishes investigative reporting, partnered with Forensic Architecture, a London-based research agency that uses architectural analysis to investigate human rights violations, to create a painstaking 3-D reconstruction of the events of December 1st. The investigation contradicted the ballistics report. Based on the reconstruction, Disclose and Forensic Architecture concluded that the weapon had not been used according to regulations, and that the officer must have been aiming for a residence when he fired. The investigation relied in part on videos that had been found on social media. Because it was conducted outside of the official judicial framework, the investigation itself has no legal validity, Grazzini said, and so the various official investigations continue, sustained in part by continuous popular attention. Milfet Redouane, Zineb’s daughter, meanwhile, recently filed charges against Christophe Castaner, the former Interior Minister, for obstructing the investigation by downplaying police responsibility. In 2019, Castaner said more than once that Redouane had died of post-operative shock, and that it would be false to say that police had killed her.

The case has taken on new resonance in the context of Macron’s newly proposed legislation, which aims to enhance the “protections” of the police and strengthen domestic surveillance through the use of drones and video cameras. An article in the original version of the law, proposed in October, stated that sharing images of officers with the intent of “harm” was a criminal offense, punishable with up to a year in prison and 45,000 euros in fines. This section, known as article 24, was met with national outcries, leading Macron’s party to promise that it would be rewritten. The latest version prohibits the “identification” of police officers or their family members, if done with malevolent intentions, under the guise of protecting their personal data. Senators also increased the penalties to 75,000 euros in fines and up to 5 years in prison. This vague new phrasing, according to one of the law’s co-rapporteurs, aims to protect police officers and target other kinds of information beyond just images—particularly on social media—that could lead to the officers’ identification.

When we spoke before the new version of the article was released, Grazzini was concerned. He worried that although the language in article 24 does not explicitly prohibit anyone from filming, the prohibition on sharing images will lead to a de facto ban against it. Filming the police has already led to police aggressions against bystanders in more than one case. Redouane’s daughter herself has wondered if perhaps the officer had aimed at her mother because he thought she had been filming him.

The issue of identifying police officers is only one of many concerning aspects of the global security law, which comes as France has developed its police apparatus. In 2015, after a horrific Paris attack claimed by ISIS that left 129 dead, the government declared a state of emergency. In 2017, the government voted to integrate aspects of the state of emergency into the law. This substantially increased the powers of the national police and the Interior Minister. Through prefectures or the Interior Minister, the state can now restrict individuals’ movements across the country or search their house if they are merely suspected of threatening public safety. On the basis of anti-terrorism, other measures have since continued to expand the reach of policing: In December 2020, three decrees extended the permitted police surveillance of activists and their communities.

In parallel with the global security law, Macron’s party has also proposed a bill against “radical islamism” that would “reinforce republican principles” and target “separatism,” an accusation that politicians have long lobbed against Muslim communities. The bill would speed up the trial period for online hate speech, restrict homeschooling in most cases, and withhold visas for visitors in “polygamous situations.” While the global security law directly strengthens a police force, the separatism law further criminalizes populations historically targeted by the police, notably immigrant-descended groups in lower-income quartier populaires.

The surveillance of Muslims has ramped up since October of last year, when a terrorist killed a high school teacher. In November, police detained and interrogated four ten-year-old children suspected of promoting terrorism. In January, the Minister of the Interior announced that the government had closed 9 of the 18 mosques they had been surveilling on grounds that they were promulgating “islamist separatism.”

For now, Redouane’s case remains tangled in a fog of ongoing investigations and expert reports. The IGPN’s investigation has still not reached a conclusion. Milfet Redouane moved to Marseille after her mother’s death. Although she has worked with activists (and spoke out herself against the global security law), she has also said in interviews that she does not want to get involved in French politics, as an Algerian citizen. What she wants, she has repeated, is to know the truth of what happened.

As France’s police apparatus intensifies its strength and reach, Marseille will feel the consequences. Unofficial estimates (“unofficial” because the government bans data collection related to race and religion) suggest that around a quarter of the city’s residents are Muslim, and many live in northern neighborhoods that have long been ignored and underserved by local government. These are the communities that will face the consequences of the fear Macron’s party has stoked. The party’s increasingly hard-right rhetoric of “separatism” blames them for the result of systemic, racist separation long instilled by France’s post-colonial immigration policies, creating difficult cycles of poverty and violence. The crime and disillusionment for which Marseille is nationally known cannot be dissociated from the history and politics that have shaped it. In a city where buildings literally collapse from poverty, sending in the police is unlikely to solve the problem.