This was one of the first questions my Uber driver asked me as we drove through Paris.
Je ne la connais pas du tout, la police française
I responded, a little surprised. I had few encounters with the police in the States, let alone with those in France. So of course it would be four weeks later, that I would get to know the French police.
Around 18h20 on a warm Saturday evening, I left my flat for an evening of swing dancing with Parisian Lindy Hoppers. I was turning the intersection of Rue Bichat and Rue Faubourg du Temple when I was approached by a Franco-African teenager, who couldn’t have been older than sixteen-years-old. He wore a black cut-off tank, khaki shorts, and eyebrows gently furrowed with anxiety. He told me that he was lost, and that he would like to borrow my phone to call his mom. After a split second internal struggle between common sense and disgustingly instinctive stereotyping, I gave this boy both benefit of the doubt, and my iPhone. He made a quick call, and departed with my device.
I ran off after him, shouting in English (a sad sign I am still inherently an anglophone), begging him to stop. Unfortunately, my morning jogs proved ineffective, and I was unable to keep up. Now it was I who had to borrow a telephone. A group of six French girls, a hotel manager, and a restaurant owner helped me contact my local friend Nicolas, my mother, and the police.
When the police arrived at the scene, they told me to get in their sedan. We drove around Belleville for twenty minutes looking for the boy. However, he turned off location services making my device untraceable. The officers told me to search the streets for the culprit. It was horrible, sizing up every adolescent boy of African descent, trying to decifer the innocent from the guilty. We even stopped one innocent boy. The officers eventually dropped me off at the commissariat, where I waited hours with Nicolas before giving my civil complaint statement.
After my petty theft extravaganza, I can conclude that the French Police Department is much more relaxed than the American Police force. They even have time to drive around college students in search of an telephone. During ride-alongs, officers stop the car to chat and laugh with passerbys. Similarly, the commissariat environment is no more serious. Officers are out of uniform, dressed down in t-shirts and jeans. Staff joke with the detained, and paperwork/civil complaints are handled without haste. Another aspect of leisurely French life-style–I guess you can’t pick and choose.
I probably will never see my iPhone again, but this isn’t important. Though that Franco-African boy, of nothing more than sixteen-years-old, made off with my mobile, I’m determined to maintain my ability to trust and judge each person independently. For the hearty price of a smartphone, I was chauffeured by the Fro-po, graced by Nicolas’ friendship, and schooled in the art of responsible benevolence. It’s for those reasons I can still be grateful, and a little bit amused.