Criminal Casbahs examines the relationship between the police and North Africans in two French Mediterranean port cities, Marseille and Algiers. Police forces in Marseille and Algiers developed distinct practices of targeted policing, using special brigades, laws, and surveillance techniques to police North African neighborhoods. In their everyday encounters, the police sought to regulate how and where North Africans inhabited urban space, patterns reflected in arrest data.
By comparing Marseille, a metropolitan melting pot, and Algiers, a colonial capital, this project allows us to see how race influenced policing in the French Empire. In Marseille and Algiers, urban space was imbued with racial categorizations. Politicians, journalists, and police officers alike tied discourses of difference, and assumptions of North African criminality, to the spaces where North Africans lived and worked. In Algiers, this space was the Casbah, an ancient Ottoman fortress that now had become the primary neighborhood for Algerians in the segregated city. In Marseille, officials focused on the neighborhood surrounding Rue des Chapeliers, a tangle of narrow alleys that French observers called the “Casbah” of Marseille.
The policing of these spaces overlapped with narratives North Africans’ inherent difference and innate criminality, discriminatory stereotypes that made the police certain they would find specific types of North African criminals. Official reports, police memos, newspaper articles, and academic studies all produced a familiar idea of the North African criminal. North Africans, these stereotypes said, were violent, deceitful, jealous, proud, and innately prone to theft and sexual deviance. These racist tropes were more than just words on a page. Police officers on their beat in Marseille and Algiers believed that North Africans would act a certain way and be guilty of certain crimes.
Criminal Casbahs builds on extensive qualitative research conducted in the French colonial archives on the relationship between police officers and Algerians in Marseille and Algiers. However, neither city recorded comprehensive criminal statistics during the mid-20th century. In the archives, I discovered a series of daily crime reports recounting city-wide police activity in both Marseille and Algiers. I gathered these reports and used them to build a database tracking the types of crimes associated with Algerians, as well as compiling general criminal statistics for both Marseille and Algiers. The daily police reports are both informative and limited. In many cases, I can obtain one report per day for entire years. However, other years have been lost or damaged in the archives. To model the method, I have created a dataset from the year with the most complete records for both cities – 1946. The dataset includes the type of crime, name, gender, and nationality of the accused criminal and the victim. In cases where either the criminal or victim is unknown or the type of crime does not have an explicit victim (for example: public indecency or vagrancy), this is noted. The Criminal Casbahs team then analyzed the proportion of Algerians within overall rates of crime in Marseille and Algiers, resulting in the graphs displayed for each city.
Though “nationality” is listed as a category in this data, it should be noted that police often did not include this information in their daily reports. At times, officers would note ethnicity or nationality – identifying someone as Italian or as an “indigene” – but this was not a standardized practice. I am able to identify North Africans in these records using an analysis of the names of the accused criminal or reported victim, as the case may be. I am similarly able to do this with the Jewish community in Algiers and Armenians in Marseille. While there is an element of stereotyping involved in this methodology, it is informed by years of research on these cities and knowledge of French and North African naming practices.
The aim of Criminal Casbahs is two-fold. First, it is useful to understand the relative prevalence of certain types of crime within the given cities. Newspaper records, for example, tend to emphasize coverage of the most scandalous crimes. Based on headlines, one might picture Marseille and Algiers as riddled with murder and elaborate heists. But a broader picture of the data tells us that most crimes recorded by the police were actually minor incidents of property theft, sometimes as trivial as shoplifting soap or stealing a piece of laundry off the drying line. One common form of theft – stealing the sheets from hotels at checkout! Datasets coupled with qualitative archival analysis can help give us a better understanding of the overall picture of crime and police activity.
Second, the data tells us what police did. This database cannot really represent the full picture of criminal activity in Marseille and Algiers. Crimes certainly happened without police knowledge and the dataset cannot reflect the actual guilt of those arrested or accused by the police. But the daily reports and the resulting dataset can tell us what the police did and what community members reported to the police. It tells us about police actions and assumptions. The blatant overrepresentation of North Africans in certain categories of crime, I argue, is not an indication of higher rates of actual delinquency. Rather, it indicates a police focus on this racialized minority population, singling them out for repression because police “knew” what types of crimes Algerians would commit.
