‘Pests not gangsters’: Policing ‘undesirables’ through racial dispersal in Paris

A 2018 trial revealed that Parisian police officers routinely targeted racialized young men with what they call ‘evictions of undesirables.’ Drawing on the theory of racialized organizations, this study examines how the French police construct their understanding of undesirables, what role citizen grievances play, and with what consequences for the spatial order enforced. Findings show that, in one of Paris’ diverse neighbourhoods, order maintenance policing was based on the schema of undesirability, a racialized assumption about who belongs in public space. This schema structured the organizational processes established to sort and channel competing grievances, the protocols and pathways through which they were processed, and the resulting police actions. This gave rise to a policy of racial dispersal, through which officers repeatedly ‘evicted’ young Black and Arab residents from the public spaces of their own neighbourhoods, regardless of their behaviour, to respond to a sub-set of residents who complained about the youth’s presence, and to preserve the city’s ‘good physiognomy.’