Posted on 11/10/2005 2:29:17 PM PST by ncountylee
THE exchange could hardly have been worse for the French police as they strive to allay their reputation as enemy of the ethnic estates.
TF1, the television channel, showed a young Arab on the outskirts of Lyons objecting politely about the insulting manner of an officer who had demanded his identity papers.
"You want me to take you to a transformer?" the officer sneers back, referring to the electricity station where two teenagers were electrocuted while fleeing an identity check.
The incident sparked the riots.
"We don't give a shit if your estate calms down," said the officer, using the disrespectful "tu" rather than "vous".
In fact, the more it gets f...ed up the happier we are."
The episode hardly conveyed the responsible manner for which the Government has been congratulating the hard-pressed forces de l'ordre during the ethnic rioting that broke out in response to the teenagers' deaths on October 27.
It did illustrate the wall of incomprehension that separates the white French police from the inhabitants of the sprawling estates whose young men have gone on the rampage.
(Excerpt) Read more at themercury.news.com.au ...
Good luck on your Final Exam. All the previous tests for the past 1340 years or so have failed!
I don't know any cop who would have answered differently. How are they supposed to respond? Beg?
the police must do nothing more than politely asking the youth (in formal French), to please cease and decease.
Maybe he should address it to both the beater and the beatee.
"Wouldn't they use "tu" with anyone younger detainee -- as a way of establishing who has the authority in the situation?"
Not usually, no.
Tu is disrespectful when spat. It's not just "you"
In English history, the Quakers were often beaten and even killed because they insisted on addressing everyone with the informal "thee". To address a superior as "thee" was extremely insulting. To address a stranger as "thee" was degrading and invited a duel.
Of course, the formal, informal distinction no longer exists in English.
I think the better comparison would be, in English, if someone in authority did not address you as "you" at all, but spoke to you only in the imperative voice.
A normal traffic stop: "May I see your license please? Please step out of the car."
An imperative voice traffic stop: "Gimme your license, NOW! Get out of the car! Shut up!"
There is a difference, a marked difference. The one is normal. The other is to be barked at like a dog. It's the demeaning tone that makes the difference.
I still giggle just thinking about it.
My neighbor is our chief of police; I think I'll pass it on to him. Think of all the money it could save, if perps would just comply with such an order.
Not the "tu."
"I still think that it's ridiculous to be faulting the police for speaking roughly to a bunch of rioting thugs. My favourite TV cop -- Sipowitz -- would have started with "dirt bag", and continued while on the way to the transformer station."
Ordinarily, I would agree that being excessively concerned about the rough edges of the police is not a good way to be.
However, we have to remember that in France, the current riots were touched off by a police action, and by deaths involving two kids and a transformer. It's not just "insensitive" what the cops did here, it's inflammatory. Think of a race riot in the USA. When these riots have calmed, what does NOT happen is that the police don't go in there seeking to be as provocative as possible by using epithets and referring to the very incident that touched of the riot in the first place.
In this case, the cop caught on candid camera did reflect a truth: that really is how the cops feel and act. And when one of the key problems inciting the unrest is police attitudes and actions (think how the presence of Hessians provoked Americans during the US Revolution), it is good to have a clear, crystallized instance of what is going on down there at the street level.
Get this guy an honorary position on the Viking Kitties squad...
This is an awfully well organized rage. Burn cars and buildings, but for the most part leave people unscathed. I think someone got these guys ready for a provocation.
What an insult
To be tranformed from a bad muslim to a good muslin
Seems to me just an extension of the uncouthness of the French.
Hey Mooses: the French are uncouth.
It's common sense at that point.
"This is an awfully well organized rage. Burn cars and buildings, but for the most part leave people unscathed. I think someone got these guys ready for a provocation"
It is the custom in France to have mass movements, sometimes quite violent, in which nobody gets killed. Nobody was killed in the 1968 revolution.
Nobody has been killed in any of the mass general strikes since then.
Nobody was killed in the violent farmer actions when farmers blocked the roads and started burning trucks full of Spanish produce.
The French tradition of mass protest and even violent protest is non-lethal. That this wild Beur rampage itself didn't result in any intentional deaths merely demonstrates, to the French, that the Beurs are French. Had the Beurs gone out and started shooting up everybody, suicide bombing, going into houses and killing people, the French as a nation would have seen it as an Arab intrusion, fundamentally alien and hostile to the French way, and they would have been much more willing to use very violent force and send in the Army very early. French people saw something greater in degree than they have seen, but not utterly different in kind.
The lack of killings is what makes this thing such an internal French affair, and shows the French anyway that the disaffection of the Beurs is not irretrievable. They've already been deeply acculturated; that's why they haven't gone on a killing spree.
Well fine for the French style of protest, but these Mooses have not assimilated into France in any appreciable form, so they have no reason to believe in the French form of protest other than to coldly calculate that the French will tolerate it. Yes I am cynical. Wherever there are Mooses raising hell rather than raising themselves out of their condition, I will be cynical.
:)
Transformers! More than meets the eye!!!
Yeah, exactly, apparently anytime a white person talks to anyone not white it is racism. Make a mental note of that...
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