Policing the City

Starred review from December 17, 2021

Three young men are waiting for the late-night bus to take them to a party when a car speeds past them. Moments later, police pull up and begin to interrogate the young men about a stolen car; the men are taken in for questioning and pressured to confess despite having no prior records of wrongdoing. This encounter begins a journey for the father of one of the young men. What could make police try to force innocents to confess to a crime? While researching his book Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (the source material for this graphic novel), Fassin, a French anthropologist and sociologist, spent 15 months riding along with anticrime police squads in the Paris region of France as they patrol low-income neighborhoods. Fassin's work aimed to understand the pressures and motivations behind incidents like this. This ethno-graphic is chilling in the parallels that can be seen in the struggles of Black people in the United States, exemplified by the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. Subtle details in the art (e.g., how the bright red police armbands slowly fade from identifying police officers to resembling attire seen on fascist uniforms) really bring home the message of everyday sadism. VERDICT Highly recommended, as it adds to discussions on equity.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2022
Adapted from Fassin's original text with the same name, Policing the City: An Ethno-graphic is the graphic interpretation of results from a sociological study conducted in the mid-2000s that sought to understand policing in low-income neighborhoods in France. While this adaptation loses some 300 hundred pages in length and even more in text, it gains in Raynal's artwork, which provides a more contextual, environmental feeling than words alone could have hoped to provide, thanks to a brilliant use of coloring. Readers will recognize parallels between the violent actions of police toward people of color, immigrants, and the poor in France and policing in the U.S., all with the same racist, classist, and nationalistic justifications. The epilogue brings the ethnography into the context of 2020 with nods to the pandemic response and protests across the globe against police brutality. A warning: quotes from those observed include hate speech that goes uncensored.

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February 14, 2022
In this urgent and provocative graphic interpretation of Fassin’s findings from 15 months of research into police brutality in Parisian suburbs (originally published as a scholarly work), the French social scientist meticulously diagnoses issues undergirding the crisis. These include arrest quotas, which incentivize officers on otherwise uneventful patrols to target immigrant youth. Anti-crime squads are re-created in pulpy detail, with suspenseful encounters between officers and youth (including Fassin’s own son) that reek of racism, xenophobia, and unwarranted antagonism. Raynal renders figures with dark shading against color-saturated background panels that veer from black and green during mundane moments to red and orange during confrontations. Tensions ignite with the accidental death by electrocution of two Muslim teens who were fleeing security forces through a power substation. A whirlwind of nationwide protests, inflammatory statements from politicians, and a police-launched tear-gas grenade landing in a mosque lead to fiery unrest. Creating comics from the academic source material is no easy task, but the animation in Raynal’s artwork and creative layouts allows Fassin to expound on his theories and dramatically expose the emotional currents raging through notions of fair and equal justice.