Police eviction of “undesirables”: The spatial dimensions of racialized policing in Paris

This paper examines the police practice of “evicting undesirables” from urban public spaces and analyzes how it reproduces racial inequality. Drawing on the investigation file of a lawsuit against a Parisian police station, the study places the spatial dimension of racialized policing at the heart of the analysis. It demonstrates how the police work with other actors – residents, municipality, courts – to enforce a spatial order in which certain people, defined not by their behavior but by their age, gender, and race, are considered “out of place” in urban centers, even when they live there.