Systemic Complicity: Police Brutality and National Identity in Ladj Ly's Les Misérables
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Inspired by his youth in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, Ladj Ly’s first feature film explores the presence of the police in the banlieue from the point of view of a special crime unit. Released in 2019, after the murder of Adama Traoré and increased debate on police surveillance, Les Misérables portrays the contemporary reality of life in the suburbs through a shocking act of police brutality caught on camera and the events that follow for the policemen. This thesis explores the systems of the banlieue and their representation in the film and discusses how the shortfalls of the French government in serving the banlieue have attributed to the corruption of the police. Further, this paper analyzes each of the three members of the special crime unit. Despite their stark differences in upbringing, personality, and work ethic, each member contributes to the atrocities of the team as a whole. Because of the prejudices that exist against the banlieue and the relationship that the police have with its inhabitants, acts of police brutality are rampant. The symbols and characters in Les Misérables demonstrate that it is not simply an immoral police officer that commits acts of violence against certain citizens, but rather that the entire law enforcement system, governed by the administration’s nationalistic ideology, is at fault.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".