The use of these firecrackers, sometimes against the police or firefighters, comes from a group effect and the trivialization of violence, Ismaïl believes. “In addition, these young people notice that in other, more affluent neighborhoods, many families who have a garden use fireworks at home. And they don’t see why they couldn’t use them too. poorer communities, the border between public and private space is much less clear. The street, the park, these young people are there every day, with family, with friends to play football, to spend their day. It’s their home. , somehow.”
A police patrol surrounded by around forty individuals during an anti-drug check in the Matonge district
The Adil generation
“SO, continues the educator, when these firecrackers are banned, they experience it as a constraint to be broken and an injustice – ‘one more’. Especially since the relationships between young people and the police are confrontational relationships. These young people have the feeling of being constantly targeted, provoked or even harassed by the police.”
The young generation in the neighborhoods of Brussels is still marked by the “Adil” affair, named after this young 19-year-old Anderlecht resident who was fatally struck by a police vehicle on April 10, 2020, while he was being chased by the police. “This death was experienced as a real injustice and it remains in the memories. So, how do you think the young people who followed this affair talk about the police to their little brothers?”
It is difficult, Ismaïl emphasizes, to thwart such considerations and generalizations. Whether in the heads of certain young people or certain police officers. As a result, when uniformed firefighters accompany the police to the scene of a confrontation, there is often confusion and they are also targeted.
Molotov cocktails, stoned buses, firefighters and police targeted…: the police intervened 1,700 times on New Year’s Eve
The Gaza bombs
It is therefore useless to read into this violence conflicts linked to drugs or the defense of territories. They would rather be the fruit of a cocktail composed of group phenomena, the desire to test the limits, to confront the authorities. All against a backdrop of a feeling of injustice and the trivialization of violence.
“The street remains the socialization space for young people. And I think that they are too poorly equipped to manage, think, recontextualize everything they hear there and which comes from social networks. When they watch a video together of the Israeli army which bombs Gaza without the West reacting, they do not understand why we come to bother them when they are setting off fireworks to express themselves. In fact, they are no longer conscious. of the seriousness of the acts that they pose.”
-“Some of these young people will be condemned because we must condemnconcludes Ismaïl, but that won’t solve the problem. In a year it will start again. And a few more police officers will not solve things. In our concrete neighborhoods, killed by crack and heroin, damaged by slumlords, impoverished, the entire social fabric must be rebuilt.”
Brussels police targeted by fireworks in Neder-Over-Heembeek
Many young people associate the police with repression
Professor and director of the psychology of delinquency service at ULiège, Fabienne Glowacz in turn explains this phenomenon by listing different causes. “He questions the relationship that young people have with the police. If we rely on a survey carried out in 2020 by the Youth Forum among 1,400 young French-speaking Belgians, we discover that 70% of them associate the police with the notions of repression and sanction, more than with protection and security. Many of these young people feel they are the object of discrimination. This perception is based on proven facts, as well as on negative collective representations towards the authorities, notably relayed and amplified by social networks.
This negative perception can grow in fertile ground: the feeling of injustice which reigns within so-called working-class neighborhoods. “In these neighborhoods, young people can perceive the police as responsible for their social exclusion. And while firefighters benefit from a more positive image, they can be assimilated during events to representatives of order and figures of ‘authority.”
Faced with these representatives, violence can arise, encouraged by group effects. “Adolescence is a period of life where we seek to be part of group dynamics which lead to the trivialization and legitimization of the use of violence.”
To deal with such phenomena, Fabienne Glowacz insists on prevention, that is to say dialogue between the police and young people.
“Firecrackers are used as weapons against police, firefighters and caregivers. What’s next? Schools? Hospitals?”
