Racial profiling: the Parisian police experience.

• Author: Jobard, Fabien
• Position: Response to article by Frances Henry and Carol Tator in this issue, p. 65, and Vic Satzewich and William Shaffir, Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, vol. 51, p. 199, 2009 - Symposium on Racial Profiling and Police Culture

The controversy over racial profiling in policing that is explored within the pages of the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice echoes the violent debates within French society regarding the police--debates that take place not only in specialized journals but in the outside world as well: One only has to think about the repeated recurrence of urban riots, or "race riots," to use the term common in the United States (Waddington, Jobard, and King 2009). One of our research projects, which focused on racial profiling, has been the source of numerous discussions in France (Open Justice 2009; Levy and Jobard 2010.

More precisely, our research examined racial profiling within stop-and-searches (controle d'identite) executed by the police. Financed by the Open Justice program, it was carried out with the help of John Lamberth (Lamberth Consulting), Indira Goris, and Rachel Neild (Open Justice Initiative).

In five heavily frequented places in Paris, we tasked observers to follow police officers furtively and to register, via mobile phone, the characteristics of the persons who were stopped and searched. The telephones allowed the observers to remain unnoticed and to send their coded data via SMS to a server located in the United States. More than 500 persons who were stopped and searched were recorded, of which we now know gender, age (young or not young), type of bags (no bag, big bag, other bag), style of clothing, and race. We also coded and registered the traits of the overall population at these places (benchmarking), thus cataloguing the variables related to around 37,000 persons. Comparing the variables for the persons stopped and searched with those of the overall population, we could demonstrate possible profiling practised by the police.

In their response to Satzewich and Shaffir (2009), Henry and Tator (2011) note that "while the discourse of the denial of racism is one of the most powerful in the public arena, it also permeates research perspectives in the scholarship" (70). By this, Henry and Tator (2011) mean that denial of racism distorts and undermines scientific perceptions. In our case, anticipation as to the nature of police discourse has actually permeated our research, strongly influencing its design.

We did find it necessary to establish a reference population. The main reason for that lies in the oft-cited denominator problem (Melchers 2003; Paulhamus, Kane, and Piquero 2010). But it also relates to police discourse, particularly to the "Jane and Finch" (Henry and Tator 2011: 68) explanation offered by Hamilton's police officers: a minority's over-representation among the people stopped is explained by that minority's over-representation in the available population. Behind the long and costly deployment of observers aiming to record tens of thousands of individuals was the goal of anticipating these discourses.

In the same way, we anticipated the terrorism argument, making the carrying of bags and the characteristics of those bags one of our variables. We also aimed to introduce the question of clothing, distinguishing three types: casual, business, and youth culture...