French police under spotlight over Liverpool
fans’ treatment
Crowd control tactics at Champions League final
highlight rift between law officers and public in France
Jon Henley
@jonhenley
Mon 30 May
2022 15.02 BST
Television
images of Liverpool fans being casually teargassed and pepper-sprayed at the
Stade de France before Saturday’s chaotic Champions League final have – not for
the first time – trained a spotlight on France’s policing methods.
Organisations
from Amnesty International to the UN’s high commissioner for human rights have
criticised France’s crowd control tactics, with Human Rights Watch detailing
the extensive physical injuries caused by weapons from truncheons to teargas
grenades, rubber bullets and larger “flash-ball” rubber pellets on peaceful
citizens in recent years.
A video of
four white officers brutally beating an unarmed black music producer in his
Paris studio in November 2020 was the latest in a string of violent incidents
to cause widespread outrage, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to act.
Announcing
a series of reforms last year aimed at improving relations between the police
and public as well as improving officers’ working conditions, Macron said
French police must be “above reproach” and “when there are mistakes, they must
be punished”.
Long a
taboo subject, French policing – viewed by its many critics as instinctively
repressive and favouring disproportionate force – has become a major political
issue, especially since the gilets jaunes protests of 2018 and 2019, in which
an estimated 2,500 protesters were injured, with several losing eyes or a limb.
At least
1,800 police and gendarmes were injured in the same protests, according to
interior ministry figures, however, and French police argue they are the target
of growing violence, some of it extreme and deliberately aimed at maiming or
even killing.
Experts say
part of the present problem is an intake of hastily recruited, poorly trained
officers since the 2015 Paris terror attacks, when entry requirements were
lowered and training cut from 12 months to eight – with trainees on duty after
three.
But there
are underlying issues, too – the principal one being the fundamental relationship
between France’s police and the public. French police and gendarmes generally
see themselves not as servants of the people but as protectors of the state and
government.
That is
certainly how most French people see the French national civil police force and
officers from the military gendarmerie – many of whom will have been posted to
communities hundreds of miles removed from their own.
One
criminologist, Sebastian Roché, says the French police are “wired to be
insulated from society, to respond only to the executive”. Combined with
France’s centuries-long tradition of political street protest, that produces an
explosive cocktail.
Wary of the
street, French politicians – particularly in the interior ministry – have long
shielded the police, entrenching a deep lack of public trust. Macron himself
said in 2019: “Do not speak of police violence or repression – such words are
unacceptable in a state under the rule of law.”
There is
also, many French NGOs and community groups say, very clearly a problem of
widespread racism. Nor does France have an independent police watchdog: the
IGPN inspectorate that investigates abuse allegations is made up mostly of
police officers.
Jacques de
Maillard, a researcher specialising in police issues, says France’s police
force faces “structural problems, in terms of recruitment, training, philosophy
and management”.
Most
officers, he says, join the police for good reasons. But once on the job, de
Maillard told France24 television, they face an uphill battle – underfunded,
overworked and constantly criticised. “It’s exhausting, frustrating and it
breeds resentment,” he said. In 2019, 59 French police officers committed
suicide.
Greater
investment, better training and stricter recruitment procedures focusing on
interpersonal skills would all help, experts say. But the key problem remains
that of the French police’s profoundly adversarial relationship with the
public.
“The system
needs to be completely reassessed,” said de Maillard, “beginning with practices
on the ground, and making the proportionate use of force, and good relations
with the public, the absolute priorities.”
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