The epistemic power of the police

Police as knowledge workers

In France as in most countries, the police are the primary state agency producing and disseminating official data on issues of public safety and crime. This role provides them with significant influence over how these issues are understood and debated in the media and political arenas. Criminologists have long noted that official crime statistics are an unreliable source of data. They fail to capture unreported crimes; they rely on the discretion of officers who determine which reported crimes to record; they depend on shifting policies and practices for how to classify and record specific crimes; and they vary with how diligent local police forces are at sending their data to the central government (Black, 1970; Kitsuse and Cicourel, 1963). As a result, changes in official crime rates are, in large part, an artefact of changes in the rules or practices involved in the production of the statistics (Maguire, 2012). Similarly, the police control how problems of public disorder are represented, with officers curating citizen complaints, thus influencing which issues are voiced, recorded and emphasized in public statements (Cheng, 2020, 2022).

This allows police institutions to manipulate statistics about crime and public disorder, artificially inflating or decreasing rates, to shape public perceptions about how much they are needed or how effective they are (Bonelli, 2010; Patrick, 2011). In France, crime statistics were produced in a way that artificially inflated rates of ‘urban violence’ and immigrant criminality (Mucchielli, 2000). In the early 1990s, the national police established a new administration to measure the rate of ‘urban violence’ in ‘sensitive neighbourhoods’. Over the years, the number of neighbourhoods considered ‘sensitive’ tripled, leading to an artificial increase in the rate of urban violence. Similarly, police leaders and politicians used a misleading interpretation of crime statistics to promote a narrative about the exponential rise of the criminality of immigrants, by conflating changes in law enforcement practice with changes in criminality, and by comparing the crime rate of foreigners and French citizens without excluding offences related to immigrants’ legal status. These statistics were then used to justify a political consensus that framed insecurity as a major problem, blamed young men with immigrant backgrounds living in marginalized neighbourhoods and promoted solutions that focused on strengthening the police and judicial response to crime (Bonelli, 2010).

In addition to crime statistics, the police control the production and dissemination of data about the policing practices deployed to address crime and disorder, such as stop and search, arrests or the use of force. Studies found that the degree of transparency of police forces depends on the presence of laws requiring data collection and dissemination, the implementation of community-oriented policing styles and the personal views of executives (Chanin and Courts, 2013; Chanin and Espinosa, 2016; Rosenbaum et al., 2011).

Although this scholarship is helpful to understand under what conditions police forces are more likely to publish data on their practices, it starts from the assumption that transparency is, or should be, the norm. Yet, studies consistently show that police opacity, not transparency, is the norm (Brodeur, 1984; Matusiak et al., 2022; Monjardet, 2005; Westley, 1956). In France, there are very few legal obligations of transparency for the police, and the two national forces publish little and incomplete data about their actions. Although identity checks are primary policing tools (Gauthier, 2015; Jobard, 2002a), no official data is published on them, and it remains unknown how many stops the police conduct, where, against whom, for what motives and with what outcomes. Moreover, until 2018, neither of the two main national police forces (Police Nationale and Gendarmerie Nationale) published systematic data on the use of force and firearms, or on the number of people injured or killed during police interventions. When they started doing so, the data was patchy and inconsistent from one year to the next.

The police's ability to control how crime rates are measured and disseminated, and how much data about their practices is published, allows them to disseminate a carefully selected set of data, which bolsters their image and maintains potentially contentious practices out of public view. Thus, the French crime statistics bulletin, which measures recorded crime through 107 categories, includes two categories for offences targeting police officers (‘offence against a police agent’ and ‘violence against a police agent’) – data that interior ministers regularly draw on to argue that officers face heightened levels of danger. However, it does not record violence committed by officers. This helps the police, and the government more generally, to channel the media and political conversation toward ‘the problem of anti-cop violence’ and away from police violence.

Restricting others’ ability to produce data

The police also hold significant control over the extent to which other actors, such as journalists, watchdog institutions and academic researchers, can collect and analyse data on policing practices. This control depends on two leverage points: the ability to grant or deny access to policing spaces and records, and the degree to which the police (or government) control the funding and resources allocated to academic research about policing.

Until the early 1980s, French police forces remained closed to researchers (Monjardet, 1997). Centralized governance played a key role in stifling research; researchers must obtain permission from the Interior Ministry, which keeps tight control over which researchers are given access and to which spaces. In the early 1980s, when the left came to power, some research institutes on crime and criminal justice gained a measure of autonomy from the government and launched a small but active scholarship on policing that took off in the 1990s. However, this academic field remained dependent on state commissions and funding and its research agendas were largely determined – or at least authorized – by police institutions (Bonelli, 2010; Mucchielli, 2000). As sociologists of knowledge have shown, the structure of research funding influences the directions and content of knowledge production (Hoenig, 2018).

Police forces also routinely restrict access to independent agencies investigating misconduct allegations. The state-appointed watchdog agency created in the early 2000s to oversee police ethics, the Commission Nationale de la Déontologie de la Sécurité (CNDS), regularly complained ‘about the persistence and recurrence of practices aiming to limit or obstruct investigations or monitoring of police actions’, deploring ‘a tendency to deal with all problems exclusively internally’ (Commission Nationale de la Déontologie de la Sécurité, 2011). In its 2010 annual report, the agency noted, for the tenth consecutive year, the recurrence of instances in which officers refused to record complaints against their peers, refused to record allegations of police violence in proceeding records, and failed to grant persons injured during arrest with access to a medical professional. The CNDS also noted a pattern of evidence being ‘lost’ or disappearing in police misconduct proceedings.

In addition, the state ideology of anti-racialism, which deems the production of racial or ethnic statistics illegitimate and dangerous, strongly limits the possibilities of producing evidence of racial inequalities in policing (Boutros, 2022; Simon and Jacobs, 2010; Simon and Stavo-Debauge, 2004). Anti-racialism is based on the idea that, to overcome racist oppression, we must eliminate racial categorizations and endorse an ‘indifference to difference’. French law bans the collection of data on people's race, ethnicity or religion, including for research purposes (with limited exceptions). Thus, the police do not collect systematic data about race or ethnicity, and policing scholars have struggled to quantify racial disparities in policing.

As a result, until the late 2000s, there were significant gaps in academic research on issues of interest to activists. For example, very few scholars were able to examine police use of force empirically. When Jobard published his book on the topic in 2002, he noted ‘nothing is known about the situations in which force is used: we don’t know when it occurs, or what happens when it occurs’ (Jobard, 2002a: 18). Similarly, until the late 2000s, no study was able to quantify racial disparities in police stops (with the exception of Lévy, 1987).

Precluding issues from reaching the political agenda

The capacity of the police to control the production of data about their practices allowed them to dismiss allegations of brutality and shut down attempts to raise the issue in the political debate. For example, after the CNDS published its annual report for 2004, a socialist parliamentarian filed a question to the interior minister, noting that a 38% increase in the complaints received by the CNDS, and the fact that the victims were overwhelmingly of Maghrebin or African origin. In response, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy drew on official statistics to argue that police were not perpetrators of violence, but rather, faced increasing rates of anti-police violence. He said that in 2004, ‘there were 21723 incidents of violence against police officers (which is a 90.2% increase compared to 1996) and 3852 officers were injured in the course of their duties’. ¹ He then contrasted these police-produced data to the CNDS data, suggesting that, when one compares the number of complaints received by the CNDS with the total number of police interventions, allegations of unlawful violence affected only 0.03% of interventions.

Sarkozy's argument was flawed in several respects. For one, the claim of a 90% increase was misleading; it hinged on the choice of 1996 as the comparative point, yet available data shows that between 2000 and 2004, there was no significant increase in the number of recorded incidents of violence targeting police. ² The increase in the late 1990s could signal shifts in the way these incidents were defined or counted, rather than an actual increase in rates of violence, but parliamentarians had no way of knowing how these statistics were constructed. In addition, Sarkozy contrasted police-produced data about violence against the police, which is a comprehensive count of all reported cases, with CNDS-produced data, which is not (the CNDS was relatively new and victims were much more likely to file complaints for police brutality through police stations or prosecutors’ offices). The police did not release data on reported cases of police violence, nor did they publish statistics on use of force and firearms, or on the number of people injured or killed during police interventions.

Thus, the government drew on police-produced knowledge and police-manufactured ignorance to dismiss the CNDS’s claims. Lawmakers, who could only access the data police forces selectively chose to release, had no way to effectively challenge the argument that the police are overwhelmingly victims, not perpetrators, of violence. The debate ended there.

Challenging the police's monopoly over knowledge production

Activists can challenge the police's monopoly over knowledge production by producing knowledge that makes up for missing or incomplete data. Given that quantitative data are widely considered to be the most credible and reliable form of data, especially in policy circles (Merry, 2016), movements’ endeavours to produce statistical data can be particularly influential. However, they require significant resources and expertise. In France, such knowledge projects were led by large organizations and media companies.

I have discussed elsewhere how, in the late 2000s, the transnational organization, Open Society, funded France's first study to quantify racial disparities in police stops (Boutros, 2022). To overcome the absence of systematic records of identity checks and the ban on collecting racial statistics, the study adopted a research design in which researchers observed stops in public spaces and compared the visible characteristics (race, gender, age, clothing style) of all the people present, and those of individuals stopped by the police. The study, which found that people perceived as Black and Arab were six and eight times more likely to be stopped than those perceived as White (Open Society Justice Initiative, 2009), had a significant impact on the political debate. Mainstream media unanimously framed it as the ‘scientific proof’ of the existence of discriminatory stops in France; politicians on the right and on the left reversed their decades-long denial of racial inequalities in policing and started recognition racial profiling as a reality. Even police leaders admitted that the study's results were ‘scientifically indisputable’. ³

Another knowledge project was a database of police-involved deaths. In the absence of official data on police use of lethal force, the independent media outlet Basta worked on compiling information from activist-kept tallies and news reports to produce the country's first comprehensive database of police-involved deaths. The database recorded 781 cases of deaths caused by on-duty police officers between 1977 and 2022, ⁴ an average of 17 deaths per year. It showed that the vast majority of victims were men (92%) and half were under the age of 27. Most victims (57%) died of gunshots, 56% of whom were unarmed. Only 3% of deaths took place in the context of terrorist attacks, whereas 24% happened during an identity check. Although the database did not include information about the victims’ origin or ethnicity, one researcher used family names as a proxy for immigrant origin and found that victims overwhelmingly had names connoting an immigrant origin in North Africa, and to a lesser extent sub-Saharan Africa ⁵ (Le Derff, 2023).

Publication of this database had two important effects on the political debate. First, it pressured the police to publish their own data. On the heels of its publication, the police inspection service Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale (IGPN) started publishing annual reports with data on police use of force, police-caused injuries and police-caused deaths. Although the data was often inconsistent from one year to the next, this represented a significant move toward more transparency. Second, the existence of official and independent data on police homicides allowed activists and the political opposition to discredit official statements that blatantly misrepresented policing practices. In 2023, when an uprising erupted following the killing of Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin affirmed that ‘police use of firearms, and the number of people who died as a result, has decreased since 2017’. Darmanin insisted that the problem was a stark and dangerous increase in peoples’ refusals to stop, which put officers at risk of injury and death. Like scores of interior ministers before him, Darmanin relied on the authoritativeness of his ministry, as the state agency producing statistics about policing practices, to assert the credibility of his claim. However, unlike his predecessors, his statement was quickly challenged and discredited. Drawing on Basta's database and on a 2021 IGPN report, which showed that lethal police shootings of moving vehicles had increased fivefold since 2017 (Roché et al., 2022), politicians and journalists called out the minister's ‘lie'. France's largest daily, Le Monde published an article titled ‘The number of police shootings has decreased since 2017: why this statement by Gérald Darmanin is false’. ⁶ Activists relied on this statistic to demand repeal of the 2017 law that expanded police powers to use lethal force against moving vehicles.

Thus, contesting the police requires that activists challenge the police's control over the production and non-production of data about policing practices. It also requires disrupting the widespread perception that police officers are credible and that their accounts are more trustworthy than those of their targets.

Assumption of police credibility

In every society, there is a hierarchy of credibility, an ‘established status order in which knowledge of truth and the right to be heard are not equally distributed’ (Becker, 1967: 242). In France as in most western countries, the police are at the top of the hierarchy of credibility, they are widely assumed to be reliable and trustworthy, whereas the groups most targeted by the police – marginalized and racialized youth – are at the bottom, routinely stigmatized as criminal and untrustworthy (Jobard, 2012). The police benefit from credibility excess, they are granted more credibility than the average citizen, whereas the groups most targeted by them suffer from credibility deficit, in that they are given less credibility than others because of race and class prejudice (Fricker 2007).

As a result, when a police intervention is contested, the media are more likely to cover police narratives, and to sideline the testimonies of victims and witnesses as untrustworthy. In 2005, when teenagers Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré were electrocuted to death after they hid in an electric substation to avoid a police stop, the media coverage was dominated by the police version of events. Responding to the uprising that erupted after their deaths, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said on national television that no investigation was necessary because the officers had done nothing wrong. He claimed that the officers had not been pursuing the teenagers; ‘when the tragedy happened, the police officers had been back at the precinct with the other arrestees for twenty minutes’. ⁷ This narrative quickly became the taken-for-granted account of the teenagers’ death. In the mainstream media, journalists reported the official narrative without interviewing witnesses to the incident. It was only after 18 days following the incident that a local paper interviewed the surviving victim. His account contradicted the official narrative as he insisted that the police were chasing them until they hid in the electric substation. ⁸ Even then, and despite continued revolts, politicians and mainstream media continued to rely on the police's narrative of events. One year later, police radio recordings showed that one of the officers informed his colleagues ‘two individuals are located. They are climbing over the wall to go on the EDF [electric] site. We should surround the area’, adding ‘if they enter the EDF site, they’ll be dead meat.’ ⁹

The assumption that police accounts are credible is not just a social convention, it is also a legal rule. In French law, police records are assumed to be truthful (le procès-verbal fait foi), and courts have ruled that, in general, ‘the testimony of a police officer … is more credible than that of a drug trafficker’, including in police misconduct cases (cited in Jobard, 2012). The legal assumption of credibility represents a formidable obstacle to accountability. In his analysis of legal cases, Jobard (2012) showed that police violence is only considered illegitimate when a narrow set of conditions are met. The victim must be deemed credible, which in practice means have had no prior contact with the criminal justice system. The police abuse must be of remarkable magnitude. There must be external evidence, such as scientific evidence or credible witnesses who, like the victim, have no prior contact with the police or courts. And it must be established beyond a doubt that the police acted without facing any danger whatsoever. The last condition can easily be manipulated by officers who can file a complaint against the victim for ‘offence and rebellion against a police officer’. Because the social spaces where the police are more likely to abuse their powers are also the spaces where victims and witnesses are less likely to be deemed credible, the vast majority of police abuses escape accountability. Existing data suggests that more than two-thirds of cases of police-involved deaths never go to trial, and among those that do, only one in seven end with a police officer being incarcerated. ¹⁰

Of course, the fact that journalists and judges assume the police to be more credible than ordinary citizens does not mean that officers are universally perceived as credible. The families of victims of police killings that I met during my fieldwork often spoke about realizing that officers routinely lie to cover up misconduct. Recalling how her family received two contradictory accounts of her brother's death, one sister reflected, ‘we are all socialized into believing that the police are there to protect us, that what they say is the truth, but for us, all of this was quickly swept away’. ¹¹ These experiences provide the foundation for victims and activists to challenge the assumption of credibility enjoyed by the police.

Casting doubts on police accounts

To disrupt the assumption that police officers are trustworthy, policing victims and activists have developed various strategies aimed at casting doubts on police accounts and promoting alternative narratives of contested interventions. These include copwatching, which entails ordinary citizens observing and sometimes filming police actions to record misconduct (Harju, 2020; Meyer, 2010; Simonson, 2016), disseminating videos of police brutality on social media (Bouté, 2021; Clark et al., 2017), or conducting counter-investigations.

In France, the Truth and Justice movement, which organizes against police killings and impunity, has developed and disseminated the tactic of counter-investigations since the 1990s. Counter-investigations consist of lay actors investigating the circumstances of fatal police interactions, independently from the judicial investigation that is deemed partial or incomplete, through carefully reviewing all the pieces of evidence and collecting missing elements that might shed light on the facts (Jobard, 2002b; Pregnolato, 2021). This can involve launching calls for witnesses, reading a copy of the investigation file to look for inconsistencies or contradictions in the police narrative, requesting counter-autopsies, and sometimes, leaking elements of the investigation file to the press.

For example, when Adama Traoré, a Malian-origin French man, died inside the police station of his hometown of Beaumont-sur-Oise, the police told his family that he suffered a ‘sudden heart attack’ when he arrived at the station, caused by his running in hot weather while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. The next day, the prosecutor announced that the autopsy suggested a death by heart attack due to ‘a very serious infection affecting multiple organs’. Neither of these accounts seemed plausible to Adama's family and friends. The young man was known for his athleticism, he was in perfect health, and he did not drink or do drugs. Based on the advice of seasoned activists and other families of victims, Adama Traoré's loved ones launched a counter-investigation. In reading the investigation file, they discovered that the prosecutor had lied: although the first autopsy report had indeed mentioned an infection, it also concluded that the cause of death was asphyxia, an element the prosecutor had conveniently left out of his public statements. The prosecutor had also failed to mention that the officers who arrested Adama had testified that they kept him in a face-down hold on the ground with the weight of three bodies on his back for several minutes. Adama, they said, told them that he had difficulty breathing. When the officers got off his back, handcuffed him and placed him in the police van, Adama fainted and lost control of his bladder. Adama's loved ones also noticed an important contradiction between the officers’ testimonies and those of the medical professionals who were called in. The arresting officers claimed that, upon their arrival at the police station, they placed Adama in the recovery position and immediately called medical services, but the firefighters testified that, when they arrived, Adama was lying face-down on the floor, handcuffed with no one attending to him. The officers seemed unconcerned and told them that he was ‘faking it’, but when the firefighters checked, they found he had already stopped breathing. Moreover, Adama's family requested a counter-autopsy, which discredited the hypothesis of an infection and confirmed that the death had resulted from asphyxia, although it remained vague as to what might have caused the asphyxia.

Based on these elements, Adama Traoré's loved ones developed a counter-narrative about the circumstance of his death. In the media, they raised doubts about the theory of a health condition, suggesting Adama died of asphyxia caused by the restraining hold that the officers used against him. They leaked elements of the investigation file to the media, argued that the prosecutor had knowingly lied about the autopsy's conclusions, and requested that the case be moved to another district. Within two months of Adama's death, they had successfully introduced their counter-narrative in the mainstream media. The largest local newspaper Le Parisien ran an article titled ‘Adama Traoré's death: The hypothesis of asphyxiation under the weight of the police officers’, whereas the biggest daily Le Monde emphasized that the police narrative was being contested with the title ‘Adama Traoré's death: a fireman contradicts the policemen's version’. ¹²

Thus, counter-investigations allow victims to cast doubts on the credibility of police narratives (Jobard, 2002b) and to bolster the credibility of marginalized and criminalized groups. However, producing this evidence is not enough, activists and victims also need to gain access to mainstream media platforms to promote their counter-narratives. Yet, the police benefit from structural advantages in their access to the media.

Privileged access to the media

As state institutions, police forces have professional, well-resourced communication teams that work with journalists on a daily basis to promote news stories that portray them in a positive light (Berthaut, 2013; Meyer, 2013; Sedel, 2013). The dependence of journalists on the police for crime news provides the police with leverage vis-à-vis the media. As media scholars have shown, the police often promise access to police sources and exclusive stories in exchange for positive coverage, and conversely, they can ‘blacklist’ some media platforms when they publish articles critical of the police (Berthaut, 2013). Although the police may not completely dominate in their relationship with the media (Mawby, 1999), the organizational and structural constraints of the media result in their privileging of police sources (Beckett and Sasson, 2004; Lawrence, 2000; Reiner, 2007).

Political scientist Paul Le Derff (2023) studied the media coverage of lethal police interventions in France between 1990 and 2016. He found that only one-quarter of all reported cases become salient in the news media (i.e. have more than 13 dispatches from the French Press Association). Among these cases, most stories ‘died out’ within four days. When mainstream news outlets did cover cases, they focused on politicians’ statements, most of which were about condemning the revolts triggered by police-involved death, or, to a lesser extent, on the judicial investigations into the death. In the media, the voices of families of victims were largely absent. Le Derff proposes several explanations. Families of victims are overwhelmingly poor, racialized people who have limited resources to access the media. It generally takes them time to decide to speak publicly about their loss, and when they reach out to journalists, most cases are no longer in the news cycle. Le Derff's interviews with journalists further reveal that very few of them specialize in covering cases of police violence, and among those that have written multiple pieces, most are satisfied with relying exclusively on institutional sources. The handful of journalists who sought out the testimonies of victims’ loved ones faced strong resistance from their editors in chief, who perceived the families to be biased, and preferred maintaining good working relationships with police sources. As a result, coverage of policing issues is dominated by police voices, with the narratives of victims largely silenced and sidelined.

Moreover, with the rise of social media, police departments have turned to platforms like Facebook and Twitter to disseminate content that cultivates their public image and enlists the support of citizens in managing disorder (Walsh and O’Connor, 2019). Recent studies show that social media platforms facilitate ‘selective transparency’ by the police, as it allows them to strategically release and withhold information about officer wrongdoing that furthers police narratives (Cheng, 2021).

Raising the public profile of marginalized groups

Over the past decade, families of victims of police killings have sought to disrupt the police's near monopoly over media narratives, using a combination of social media campaigns and high-visibility public actions, to impose themselves as highly visible public figures. For example, after her brother Amine's killing by a police officer in 2012, Amal Bentounsi spearheaded a communications strategy based on high-visibility disruptive tactics. She quit her job to focus full-time on the struggle and created a collective of families, Urgence Notre Police Assassine (Emergency Our Police Kills). She chose the name because it was ‘hard-hitting’ and ‘radical’; explaining, ‘all they can do is attack us – and if they do, then so much the better!’. ¹³ On the collective's website, she published a video parodying a recruitment ad for the national police, which said ‘you want to commit violence and crimes with total impunity without ever being bothered? The police recruits, and the judiciary protects you!’. The provocative ad led to her being sued by the interior minister for defamation against the police, a lawsuit that was widely covered in the mainstream media. She also engaged in a series of visible direct actions; for example, interrupting a police protest to throw fake blood at their feet while shouting ‘murderers’. She got arrested multiple times for these direct actions, arrests that she made sure to publicize as widely as possible. Soon, journalists identified her as a vocal voice against police violence and started inviting her to debate with police representatives on talk shows. ¹⁴ In my interview with her, she reflected, ‘the media didn’t come to me, I imposed myself on them’. ¹⁵

Similarly, after Assa Traoré lost her brother Adama in 2016, she became an iconic figure of the movement against police violence. Alongside other family members and activists, she established the committee Truth for Adama, which established a strong social media presence, posting regular press releases, videos, and Facebook lives to disseminate its findings of their counter-investigation, give updates on the judicial process, and inform followers of the repression facing the family. This helped them gain tens of thousands of followers on social media. They also organized regular events, including protests, sit-ins, commemorations, and press conferences, but also cultural events, sports tournaments, and concerts in the name of Adama. Assa Traoré travelled across the country to speak at political and cultural events; she published two books about her struggle, and she accepted invitations to televised talk shows to speak about her brother's death. In addition, the committee enrolled a wide diversity of celebrities to speak about Adama's case, including artists, public intellectuals, and high-profile lawyers. The ‘Adama affair’ gained unprecedented public visibility, with mainstream media calling it ‘the case that symbolizes the struggle against police violence’.

The families’ success in becoming media personalities disrupted the hierarchy of credibility in three important ways. First, it helped humanize marginalized and racialized communities and made it more difficult for government officials to dismiss their grief and grievances. On the day of Nahel Merzouk's killing by a police officer in 2023, Assa Traoré reached out to the victim's mother, Mounia, and invited her to appear in an Instagram live on her account. In a soft voice, Mounia Merzouk spoke of her pain at losing her only child; ‘what am I going to do? I lived for him, I bought him everything, I gave him everything, everything, everything, [and then] a son of a bitch takes my son away!’. ¹⁶ After this video went viral, Mounia Merzouk was invited on public TV channel France 5, where she expressed her anger at the officer who took her son's life. This public visibility forced the government to acknowledge her. President Emmanuel Macron's first address following the killing of Nahel Merzouk focused on expressing the nation's sympathy to his loved ones:

First of all, I want to say the emotion of the whole nation, after what happened and the death of the young Nahel, and to say to his family our complete solidarity and the affection of the nation. We have a teenager who was killed, it is inexplicable and unforgiveable, and first of all, [my] words are words of affection, of shared pain, of support for his family and loved ones. ¹⁷

Third, the movement's ability to amplify the voices of policing victims helped promote not just their testimonies, but also their structural analyses of racialized policing. Some of the leading figures of the Truth & Justice movement have become regular guests on TV and radio shows for their expertise on the issue of police violence. After the killing of Nahel Merzouk, Amal Bentounsi was invited to talk on right-wing TV channel BFMTV. She spoke of the movement's calls to abolish the 2017 law, reminding viewers that, before the bill was voted into law, she launched a petition against it, which collected 77,000 signatures. She also spoke of the stark increase in police killings since 2017, saying that, within the past year and a half, there had been 16 deaths during traffic stops, ‘in majority racialized young men’. ¹⁸

Thus, the efforts of families of victims to become loud, unavoidable interlocutors in the public debate, helped them promote alternative narratives in the public and political debate. In these ways, the strategies thereby challenged the police's epistemic power.