First published anonymously on Paris-luttes.info, on June 28th 2023, as a response to the police murder of Naël and subsequent night of riots in France.
So here we are again, another one, one more, one of our own killed by police bullets. He was 17 years old. The policeman put his gun to his head and told him he was going to shoot. He fled. The cop shoots. One dead. Does a brother have to be killed to be moved to a moment of solidarity?
That of global security experts, politicians, police unions, prefects, in short, a parade of all those people who will explain in great detail that the police are exemplary, that justice will do its job, that Law is Law. They will continue to spout their filth in the media and at press conferences. Through this flood of words, they seek to hide the truth, which is however simple: the police kills. A police officer shooting his gun is only the consequence of the laws legitimizing the shooting in a situation of refusal to comply to orders, of all these experts who promote increasingly violent and sophisticated weapons so that the Ministry of the Interior buys always more of them, of those politicians who always stigmatise the same fringes of the population, the dangerous, the radicalised, the non-republican, the enemy within. They construct a racist discourse, and by their words they justify and prepare the ground. From Sarkozy to Darmanin, the same rhetoric seeks to justify a man’s death because a police officer is tired or because, in the end, the man who refuses to obey knows what awaits him.
It is therefore impossible to remain calm. No one will fight police violence better than those who experience it on a daily basis, who suffer it, who know it, the one that plagues our neighbourhoods. Back in 2005, our brothers rose up in honourable opposition to those who had made them and their families suffer for so many years. So, in response to the band La Rumeur who asked a few years ago “how long will the ghetto remain so patient?”, we reply that on this evening of June 27, some people are refusing to submit, are taking action, and will not be silent.
No justice, no peace. Today and in the days to come, the challenge is to stand alongside people who are revolting, to forge links, to provide legal and anti-rep assistance if necessary (without posing as a teacher), to write texts, distribute them, make signs, banners. If the connection is made as has been the case in the past to a certain extent (Théo affair, Adama, etc.), we will really be able to claim intersectionality, at least so that our anti-racist tirades are not exclusively words devoid of action.
