Policing the City An Ethno-graphic

Adapted from the landmark essay Enforcing Order, this striking graphic novel offers an accessible inside look at policing and how it leads to discrimination and violence.

What we know about the forces of law and order often comes from tragic episodes that make the headlines, or from sensationalized versions for film and television. These gripping accounts obscure two crucial aspects of police work: the tedium of everyday patrols under constant pressure to meet quotas, and the banality of racial discrimination and ordinary violence.
        Around the time of the 2005 French riots, anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin spent fifteen months observing up close the daily life of an anticrime squad in one of the largest precincts in the Paris region. His unprecedented study, which sparked intense discussion about policing in the largely working-class, immigrant suburbs, remains acutely relevant in light of all-too-common incidents of police brutality against minorities.
        This new, powerfully illustrated adaptation clearly presents the insights of Fassin’s investigation, and draws connections to the challenges we face today in the United States as in France.

Didier Fassin is a French anthropologist and sociologist. He is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and in 2019 was appointed to the Annual Chair in Public Health at the Collège de France, where he delivered the lecture “The Inequality of Lives.” He has conducted research in Ecuador, Senegal, South Africa, and France, particularly on moral and political issues around health and humanitarianism as well as immigration and asylum as part of a program of the European Research Council. His previous books include Prison Worlds, The Will to Punish, and Death of a Traveller.

Frédéric Debomy is a graphic-novel writer born in Fontenay-aux-Roses, France, in 1975. He has written book-length essays and nearly a dozen graphic novels, including several works on Myanmar. He is the former president of Info Birmanie, an organization dedicated to raising public awareness about the lack of democracy in Myanmar.
 
Rachel Gomme is a translator and artist based in London, England. She has translated many works of social science as well as art history and literary texts. As an interdisciplinary artist, she creates and writes about performance, presents work, and teaches in the United Kingdom and internationally.

Jake Raynal studied applied arts at Paris’s printing academy, the École Estienne, and has been making comics since 1994. He is the creator of a series of fantastical chronicles that was first published by the French-Belgian comics magazine Fluide Glacial and later turned into three books: Combustion Spontanée, Esprit Frappeur, and Les Nouveaux Mystères. He also collaborated with Claire Bouilhac on the Melody Bondage series and the Francis series. Cambrioleurs, his first foray into adventure comics, came out in 2013, followed in 2017 by a volume of the Little Comics Library of Knowledge devoted to Les Situationnistes.