Asbel López, UNESCO Courier journalist
Belgian police inspector Nestor Van Villinghen with a young immigrant. This photo and those on the following pages show scenes from a video used in Belgian police training courses.
Sensitive issues are discussed in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere.
Group work drawing on personal experience is a key feature of the Belgian
police training courses against racism and xenophobia.‘Behind the uniforms
there are human beings
who ask themselves
questions about their profession and about how they do their jobs’
Training
schemes in several European countries are getting to grips with the stereotyping
and prejudice that all too often influence police behaviour
In a vast
salon in Monceau Castle (Belgium), 13 policemen from Charleroi, a town in the centre
of the country, have been divided into teams and are absorbed in a boisterous card
game. The officers, unarmed and wearing civilian clothes, are all men in their forties.
Today, in early October, they are taking part in the fourth session of a workshop
against racism and xenophobia run by the Centre for Equal Opportunity and the Fight
Against Racism, a Brussels-based public institution founded in 1993.
Laughter erupts from the policemen and the Centre’s two instructors when the winners
of each game go on to the next round of the contest. This time they will be playing
a game according to rules none of them will know.
A game
with unknown rules
Jean, who has spent
half his 42 years in the police force, says this is what happens to immigrants when
“they arrive in a country without knowing the rules and when the rules they have
back home are no use because they don’t work in the new society.”
For example, he says, rules for women in Islamic countries are very different from
those in the West. Later on, during a review of the session, Jean says he has never
had the chance to talk about such things or discuss the relationship he has with
immigrants in the course of his work.
The workshop is one of 11 projects that nine European countries are carrying out
under an international programme called NGOs and Police Against Prejudice (NAPAP),
set up by the European Commission in 1997 to fight racism and xenophobia through
workshops for members of the police.
Each country has its own priorities and methods. As part of the British project members
of minority ethnic groups are invited to take part in the training courses. The Catalans
hold day courses for their police run by local immigrant groups. France stresses
the social integration of immigrants. In Germany emphasis is laid on making police
more aware of the problems that arise in a multicultural society.
In recent years racism and xenophobia have increased in many European countries,
especially because of economic crisis, unemployment, a rise in the immigrant population
and anti-foreigner propaganda by extreme right-wing parties who are getting more
and more votes1. In this situation, police forces are
in a particularly exposed position.
The Centre, which records and pursues cases of racist behaviour, says that in Belgium
more complaints about discrimination based on the origin of an individual are laid
against the police than against any other group2. The situation is also troubling in
other European countries. In Britain, a report by a former High Court judge, Sir
William Macpherson, said in early 1999 that there was “institutionalized racism”
in London’s Metropolitan police force. In Germany, an official survey showed that
police violence against foreigners was “not just a matter of isolated cases”. Amnesty
International’s 1999 report detailed abuses by the police in France, Spain, Greece
and Switzerland against immigrants and members of ethnic minorities.
In a democratic system, such things should not happen and the police should respect
the principle of equal rights for all citizens. To ensure such respect, the first
thing to be done is to see that stereotyping and prejudice do not affect the professional
behaviour of the police. This is not easy because police opinions and attitudes are
developed at first hand in the front line of social conflict, and are usually the
result of an accumulation of personal experiences, frustrations and misunderstandings.
The workshops run by the Belgian centre are special because they feature group work
drawing on personal experience and incidents the policemen agree to talk about. The
starting point of the six-day course is not a lecture on tolerance or study of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but contributions from the policemen during
activities including card games, role-playing, and looking at photos and film extracts.
Marisa Fella, an instructor at the Centre, says these “apparently simple” exercises
encourage serious reflection by the policemen about their professional behaviour.
She remembers one occasion when solving a puzzle opened up the subject of communication
and aggressivity and eventually turned into a debate about police brutality. “They
discussed their own violent behaviour as policemen, when and why they had been violent
or not violent, and how they dealt with violence by officers under their orders.”
A “forum for talking and thinking” was opened and allowed them to distance themselves
from their jobs, something which can be hard to do when you are in the thick of things.
A forum
for talking and thinking
Bit by bit, as confidence
is built up, the participants stop using official jargon and begin to recognize nuances.
For example, when one policeman said he could not accept the position of women in
Islam, this was already a step forward, because he was beginning to distinguish between
wholesale rejection of Muslims and his disapproval of one aspect of their culture.
Fella says the most heartening aspect of her work is to see that “behind the uniforms
there are human beings who ask themselves questions about their profession and about
how they do their jobs.” Just speaking freely and openly about these issues is already
a big step, she says, because “putting things into words and talking about them allows
you to be more objective about them, to realize their seriousness and importance
and to start thinking about them.”
This was not happening when she started the Centre’s workshops six years ago. At
that time, training focused on the immigrant, not the police. The aim was to throw
light on the culture of immigrants’ countries of origin, how they had come to Belgium,
population statistics and the significance of religious festivals like Ramadan or
practices like wearing the chador, the shawl or veil worn by Muslim women.
But the Centre’s officials soon noticed that this kind of information session not
only failed to make the police aware of cultural diversity but was even counter-productive.
The policemen got the impression that by explaining how immigrants lived, the instructors
were trying to justify behaviour that to them was unacceptable. They felt they were
being made fun of and this generated great hostility towards the course organizers.
Their comments were brutal. “The instructors think we’re ignorant and therefore racist.
. . . They give us nice little talks about immigrants, as if they’re all nice and
friendly, but they’ve never patrolled the streets like we have.”
These days, such resistance has disappeared or at least has subsided. The door to
change has opened. But problems still exist. The police say they do not know exactly
how to put into practice what they have learned in the workshops about conflict management,
non-verbal communication and handling aggression when they are back doing their job,
which nearly always involves speed, stress and confusion.
Another big problem is the programme’s lack of resources. The Centre has just five
instructors, three of them full-time. Only about 300 of Belgium’s 36,200 police and
gendarmes attended workshops like these between 1994 and 1998. A medium-term proposal
to overcome this is to have the current instructors train new ones.
Another weak point is that it’s senior officers who ask for courses to be held for
their men, who are not necessarily stationed in places where the incidence of racial
discrimination is high. What’s more, the entire staff of a police station rarely
attends the course, and this causes friction when they go back to work.
But despite everything, those who take part agree that the process of exchange and
discussion between instructors and police is encouraging.
Long-term
effects
One instructor tells
a group that five volunteers are needed for a role-playing game in which three policemen
will play the part of young immigrants and two others will be the police. The first
volunteers are those who want to play the immigrants.
When the two policemen pass the group of “immigrants”, the policeman playing the
part of Fabio, an 18-year-old Belgian citizen of Mediterranean origin, calls them
“poulets” (chickens) a French slang word meaning “cops”. The two policemen immediately
turn round to arrest the youths, while their friends laugh at a nickname that, as
police, they have all been called at one time or another.
When this episode is discussed afterwards, some of the policemen say they would have
just kept on walking and not arrested anyone for “such a trivial matter”. Another
notes that a few years ago, the youths would have had their ears boxed.
The instructor uses the episode to show how the idea of what constitutes an insult
can change over the years, pointing out that this is not just a subjective matter
and that the students gradually come to see the connection between what they learn
in the classroom and real-life situations.
Before continuing, one of the instructors explains to the police that they were called
“chickens” because Paris police headquarters is built on the site of an old chicken
farm. “Really?” murmurs one of them who had no idea of this, while his colleagues
laugh.
François Delor, a psychiatrist and instructor at the Centre, thinks this reaction
is important from a methodological standpoint. “Laughter,” he says, “is a way of
avoiding confrontation. Laughing together is sharing a kind of intimacy and that
makes it possible to work together in a climate of trust.”
The instructor’s job is to monitor everything that is said and done during the sessions
and also to spot certain expressions, put them in a broader context and use that
to break down prejudices.
Fred, who has spent 17 of his 40 years as a policeman, tells how he was once given
what he thought was a “stupid” order to arrest all the Gypsies in the market in Charleroi.
But a colleague supported the order, saying that “regular checks, especially of Gypsies,
will curb crime.” Fred retorted that “my job isn’t to arrest Gypsies just because
they’re Gypsies” and said it would be better to deploy plainclothes police who could
catch thieves red-handed, whether they were foreigners or Belgians. Fred’s story
about the clearly xenophobic aspect of an order is more effective in combating racist
attitudes than any speech because it does not come from one of the instructors but
from a fellow policeman.
Amid jokes and friendly chat in a convivial atmosphere, sensitive and serious subjects
are raised quite easily. But how can we be sure these policemen will incorporate
into their professional lives some of the things they have seen and heard in these
workshops and behave more fairly towards immigrants in general?
Delor is firmly convinced that exchanges like these have positive effects which may
some day influence the minds of these men and change the way they act. “Words and
exchanges which seem unimportant sometimes have surprising effects in the long term.”
He adds that people tend to absorb as a “potential cognitive resource” scattered
elements whose utility may not be obvious at the time.
This seems to be confirmed by Christian Raes, an assistant police commissioner in
Brussels. In an interview in the Belgian daily newspaper Le Matin in July 1999, he
said that during the training at the Centre “bonds were forged between members of
the group and something of that has remained. I haven’t changed dramatically, but
sometimes I look at things in a different way and also try to spend a bit more time
listening to my men.”
The Centre’s workshops are undoubtedly helping the fight against racism and xenophobia.
But changing behaviour patterns that are deeply rooted in a society is a long-haul
job whch depends, as ever, on the enthusiasm and determination of everyone.
1. The recent electoral successes of the extreme right in Austria and Switzerland illustrate this process.
2. Égaux et reconnus, bilan 1993-1998 et perspectives de la politique des immigrés et de la lutte contre le racisme, Centre pour l’égalité des chances et la lutte contre le racisme, page 16, Brussels, 1999.
Centre pour l’égalité des chances et la lutte contre le racisme
Rue de la Loi, 155 Résidence Palace
1040 Brussels.
Tel: (32 2) 233 06 11
email: centre@antiracisme.be
http://www.antiracisme.be
Robin Oakley, Police Training concerning Migrants and Ethnic Relations: Practical Guidelines, Council of Europe Publishing, 1994.
