Analysis
French police’s tendency to violence questioned
after latest killing
Jon Henley
Europe
correspondent
Experts say French approach is chaotic, aggressive,
brutal – and police see themselves as under siege
Fri 30 Jun
2023 14.37 BST
The fatal
shooting of a 17-year-old boy of north African descent during a police traffic
stop in a Paris suburb, and the three consecutive nights of violence and
rioting it has triggered, have once more thrown a spotlight on France’s
policing structures and methods.
The office
of the UN high commissioner for human rights (OHCHR) on Friday became the
latest international organisation to criticise French policing, saying the
shooting was a “moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of
racism and racial discrimination in law enforcement”.
The OHCHR
spokesperson, Ravina Shamdasani, said authorities should ensure that the use of
police force “always respects the principles of legality, necessity,
proportionality, non-discrimination, precaution and accountability”.
The death
of the teenager, identified as Nahel M, was the third fatal shooting by police
during traffic stops in France in 2023. There were a record 13 such shootings
last year, three in 2021 and two in 2020. Most of the victims since 2017 have
been of black or Arab origin, reinforcing claims by rights groups of systemic
racism within French law enforcement agencies.
“We have to
go beyond saying that things need to calm down,” said Dominique Sopo, the head
of the campaign group SOS Racisme. “The issue here is how we to ensure we have
a police force that, when they see blacks and Arabs, don’t tend to shout at
them [but] use racist terms against them and in some cases shoot them in the
head.”
Beyond an
institutional racism common in many police forces, French policing has a
tendency to violence that has been highlighted by groups including Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch and the Council of Europe. Police truncheons,
teargas grenades, rubber bullets and larger “flash balls” have inflicted
extensive physical injuries during demonstrations.
Long a
taboo subject, French policing – seen by many critics as instinctively
repressive and favouring disproportionate force – has become a major political
issue, particularly since the gilets jaunes protests of 2018 and 2019 in which
an estimated 2,500 protesters were injured, several of whom lost eyes or limbs.
At least
1,800 police and gendarmes were injured in the same protests, and French police
complain that they are a target of growing violence, some of it expressly aimed
at maiming or even killing. Pension reform protests this year led to similarly
brutal scenes: 1,000 police were injured in March alone.
Experts who
study policing across Europe point to a fundamental difference of structure and
approach that goes beyond strategy and tactics. They say French police and
gendarmes see themselves generally not so much as servants of the people but as
protectors of the state and government.
Consequently,
the public’s relationship with the police is different in France than in, for
example, Scandinavia, Germany or Britain. This, combined with France’s long
tradition of political street protest, produces an explosive cocktail.
Researchers say the police see themselves as under siege and reluctant to cede
ground.
Sebastian
Roché, a criminologist, says the French approach, far from aiming to pacify
protest, is deliberately confrontational and escalatory. Other researchers use
the words chaotic, aggressive, authoritarian, brutal. Roché says French police
are “wired to be insulated from society, to respond only to the executive”.
He says
French police are more heavily armed than most of their European colleagues and
deploy weapons that are often banned or used only very rarely elsewhere more
extensively – one reason why 36 people have been severely mutilated at
demonstrations in France since 2018 and three killed in the last 10 years.
A police
officer walks past a burning car in Nanterre at the end of a commemoration
march on Thursday for the teenager shot dead by police
“If the
police are more respected in Germany, Scandinavia and England than in France,
it is because they are respectable,” Roché told Le Monde earlier this year.
“Pacification and de-escalation are not the fruit of our neighbours’ different
cultures but of in-depth work on limiting the use of force.”
Wary of the
street, French politicians – particularly in the interior and defence
ministries, which control the national police and gendarmerie – have long
shielded the forces of law and order from criticism, entrenching the breakdown
in public trust.
Jacques de
Maillard, another researcher specialising in police issues, says France’s
police force now faces “real structural problems in terms of recruitment,
training, philosophy and management”.
The system
needs to be completely reassessed, De Maillard has argued, “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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