Two police officers prosecuted over the 2005 deaths of Bouna Traoré, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, at a power substation in Clichy-sous-Bois near Paris, tragedies which led to widespread rioting across France, were last month found not guilty of failing to assist persons in danger.
The decision to acquit the two officers was greeted with anger and dismay by relatives who had called for the officers to be held accountable for the deaths of the teenagers. But as sociologist Fabien Jobard of the National Center for Scientific Research notes “everything was done in the judgement to underline that if there was responsibility involved, then it was at the level of the general way the police is organised”.
The failings in the way the police work were apparent during the trial: inexperienced officers being posted to the most difficult urban areas after they leave police college, and who are just waiting to be reassigned to the provinces; officers grouped in large districts who are sent out in force to occupy an area and who then withdraw once peace returns; officers who run after youths because they don't know them and cannot pull them in under calmer circumstances the next day, and so on. As the presiding judge at the trial of the two officers held at Rennes in west France, asked: what lessons have been drawn by the police in Seine-Saint-Denis, the département (or county) adjoining Paris where the tragedy occurred, after those events of October 27th, 2005?
“The only change is that they have equipped the department in charge of intervention units to deal with 2005-style riots – which have not happened again – and have somewhat forgotten day-to-day policing,” is the response of Nicolas Compte from the police union Unité SGP Police FO, who was called by the defence as a witness at the trial. Yet, says Fabien Jobard, it has long been known that “a centralised urban police force doesn't work and that the risk of the use of excessive force increases with the remoteness of main stations and the poor information of officers on the ground”. Paradoxically one of the officers acquitted was part of a neighbourhood police unit which existed only in name after Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, abruptly got rid of local policing in 2003. This was five years after the 'police de proximité' had been brought in under socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin.
“There are racial fractures in this country … At some point this country will need to wake up, to be shocked,” one of the families' lawyers, Jean-Pierre Mignard, said on France Inter radio after the verdict. He said that these were issues that the country had failed to address, and said the judgement was symbolic of those people who looked “from afar” at what was really happening in France.
In this respect, the difference between France on the one hand, and the United States and the United Kingdom on the other is striking. After the riots at Brixton in south London in 1981, there was a swift and powerful report produced by the senior British judge Lord Scarman and as a result police officers had to give reasons for the regular 'stop and search' of young people, mostly from ethnic minorities. Then, following major police blunders in the investigation of the racially-motivated murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, the subsequent Macpherson report pointed to “institutional racism” in London's Metropolitan Police. That led to the setting up of the Independent Police Complaints Commission which examines complaints against the police.
Nothing similar has happened in France, where there was only a Parliamentary fact-finding mission, which lacked real investigatory powers, into the 2005 riots. Another example of the difference, says Sihame Assbague of the French anti-stop and search by racial profiling campaign group Stop le Contrôle aux Faciès, is that “after the death of Rémi Fraisse at a demonstration [editor's note, at the Sivens dam protest in south-west France in October 2014], a committee on the maintenance of public order was set up straight away”. She continues: “But we're still waiting for one on police-community relations, while around 15 non-whites die each year in poor areas during police operations. In France we're completely blind to race, we always have difficulty in admitting that the main victims of police violence are non-whites.”
A report on likely policing challenges in 2025, written by senior public official Patrice Bergougnoux, the man who came up with the concept of neighbourhood policing, was sent to the interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve in July 2014. It suggested creating a “doctrine of employment at the service of the population”. It said: “The population's trust in the authorities in charge of its protection is an essential condition for the success of all law and order policies.”
Yet this report, which was compiled over six months with the help of police chiefs and sociologists, has been withdrawn from public debate. The official presentation should have taken place in the summer of 2014, but it has been constantly put back by the interior ministry. First of all it was delayed because there were internal workplace elections at the interior ministry and other government departments, and it was considered that this would not provide the calm backdrop needed for a debate on the report’s findings. Then the terror attacks in January 2015 pushed the timetable back once again. The ministry says it is working on the report, especially on its findings on initial and continuous training of police officers, but an official says that “there will be no announcements before the summer”.
In fact, though, the 48 recommendations in the Bergougnoux report, 12 of which relate to police-community relations, are far from revolutionary. They suggest “simplifying” the reception areas in police stations, in providing a “greater say for the public's expectations” and to “inform them regularly on the [police] services' activities”. These are approaches inspired by the policies of “accountability” and “community policing” developed in the UK and Canada. The report says this approach could allow for a reduction in police numbers. Vancouver has 222 police officers per 100,000 inhabitants, against 330 per 100,000 in cities across France.
The report also cites the example of police stations in Spain where “citizen participation representatives” who know the “social reality of a neighbourhood” are in charge of seeking mediation and finding solutions. It says that “personnel must be made more aware of cultural differences, to develop their ability to listen and to mediate”. As for the practice of stop and search, the report considers that this has been “diverted in part from its original objective” as the searches “identify persons for offences that have no relation to the initial search requested by the prosecution”.
In the report's view better recruitment is “crucial” in order that the police services select men and women who are “psychologically strong and able to keep their cool in periods of tension”. The authors also propose better training for police management in the “prevention of psychosocial risks” in order to reduce the number of cases of suicide. Another measure proposed is the delegation of power to local levels where senior officers would have control over “all the services of the national police” in their area, for example over public security, the investigation of crimes and border controls.
'Our only means of action are fear and coercion'
This assessment of what is needed is nothing new. When neighbourhood police – police de proximité – were brought in by the Left in 1998, France was ahead of neighbouring countries in terms of police engagement with the public. Since this experiment was abruptly ended by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2003 the opposite has been true. In April 2010 Mediapart revealed the content of reports buried by the then-interior minister Brice Hortefeux. They criticised the way stop and search had become seen as a “way of making contact with an individual”.
The daily and routine use of stop and search by the police produces a “devastating effect on youths and all inhabitants of a neighbourhood”, says one of those reports. “Young people reject the security forces, which in particular causes them to run away when they are in the presence of police officers,” it notes. One key reason cited for this is: “Contacts between the police … and young people seem to be reduced to identity checks, to custody, to contact in the police stations when young people are there with family and friends.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
In November 2011 a police superintendent and MP, Jean-Jacques Urvoas, who was then national secretary on law and order issues for the Socialist Party (PS), made a joint appeal for an “end to the reasoning under which the only people to whom the police are accountable are the ministry and the prefect” and to create “evaluation measures based on user satisfaction”. Urvoas, who is today chairman of the National Assembly’s law committee, declared: “I'm always amazed that you can determine the urgent requirements in Carcassonne [south-west France] and Montélimar [south-east France] from an office in place Beauvau [editor's note, the Paris address of the interior ministry].”
The former PS senator François Rebsamen, who is now employment minister but who spoke on law and order issues during François Hollande's presidential campaign, made similar comments at the time. “Magistrates and the police should be accountable for their actions before a neighbourhood's inhabitants,” he promised just before the election in May 2012. “The citizens must be allowed to take part in defining the objectives in the fight against crime.” Without specifically mentioning the issue of search notices or 'receipts' - there has been a long debate in France about whether people who have been stopped and searched should be issued with an official notice or 'récépissé' of the police action – Rebsamen said: “It's clear that stop and search must be stopped … A break with policing based on figures and the return to neighbourhood policing will allow us to avoid this form of behaviour.”
However, in the summer of 2012 the new interior minister under President Hollande, Manuel Valls – now prime minister – was keen to make a gesture towards the police unions and buried the idea of stop and search 'receipts'. The campaign against stop and search was thus restricted to a retouching of the code of conduct for police officers and gendarmes, the return to uniforms with numbers on them (though they are unreadable) and the use of button hole cameras.
A ministerial circular of March 25th, 2015, revealed by French daily Libération, urges prefects to work to improve relations between young people and the forces of law and order in priority areas known as zones de sécurité prioritaire (ZSP). In particular, they have been asked to look for local initiatives worthy of funding. But several members of the “national coordination unit” mentioned in the circular say they only learnt of its existence in the press. Two months later and they have still not been contacted. “To create a committee without informing the members tells you something about the importance accorded to the issue,” says one of them.
There is even impatience from some police officers, too. In a press release on May 18th noting their satisfaction that the two officers in the court case were acquitted, the Unité SGP Police FO police union criticised the “abandonment of real day-to-day policing”. The union, the second-largest police union and which is politically to the left, said: “The climate of mistrust that exists between police and inhabitants in working class areas needs to be tackled on a political level.”
One of the union's national representatives, Stéphane Liévin, thinks that the ministry's appeal for local initiatives is interesting but does not go far enough “all the time that police structures are not put back into the neighbourhoods, with officers who know the people who live there”. He adds: “The acknowledgement that there's a widening gap between the police and the public is not new, isn't it now time to do something?”
Liévin says the solutions are already known. “We really must end this policy based on figures and accept that if the recorded crime figures are going up, it's not necessarily because the law and order situation is getting worse but that, for example, police officers are more available to take reports [of crime],” he says. But the union representative notes that “those in charge in the ministry of interior find it hard to respond on the issue”. He says the government seems “paralysed by ultra-liberal language that has excessively simplified the debate: it's either repression or going soft.”
Yet the issue is becoming more and more urgent. A study carried out at the end of 2012 on around 14,000 adolescents in Grenoble and Lyon in eastern France showed that only 62% of them “trust” the police. When it comes to more marginalised neighbourhoods the level of mistrust is twice as high: close to two youngsters in three say they do not trust the police, which amounts to “hundreds or even thousands of young people according to the neighbourhoods”, says one of the report's authors, sociologist Sébastien Roché from the CNRS, the French National Center for Scientific Research.
“We wanted to push the public authorities to question things,” Roché explains. “How can you police in neighbourhoods where the police are perceived as a hostile, violent and discriminatory force? It's a major problem.” But apart from one presentation at Lyon in front of the heads of the different police services, the report has received no official reaction. “Manuel Valls speaks of the ghetto, not of police-community relations,” says Sébastien Roche with regret. “Yet to change an organisation with 130,000 personnel, 80% of whom are in a union, and which is responsible directly to the government, you need someone with a desire.”
During the court hearing, lawyers for the families of Zyed and Bouna criticised one of the two police officers on trial for not having shouted out and alerted the teenagers to the dangers of the EDF power substation they were entering. “In five years in [département] 93 [editor’s note, Seine-Saint-Denis] I don't remember having seen an enormous number of people stopping when they heard 'Police, stop!'” replied the officer. Nearly ten years on, the situation is the same. “Obviously!” says an officer from one of France's brigades anti-criminalité (BAC) or anti-crime squads. “Our only means of action are fear and coercion.” Aged around thirty, this officer, who was recruited “with the bulk of the troops in the Sarkozy era”, has never experienced the policing of bygone years. He says: “There are no relationships based on trust, even with the adults. The only relationship where that can exist is with an informer, as you know you're tied to each other. It's sad but that's all I've known.”
'In reality it's the practices of the Sarkozy-era that remain'
Enlargement : Illustration 3
According to local associations, relations between the police and the public in urban neighbourhoods have got worse rather than better since 2005. “The feedback on the ground shows something of a deterioration and in particular since the election of François Hollande who had committed himself on stop and search,” says Sihame Assbague. “There are still stop and searches, it's still difficult to assert one's rights against the institution of the police, and there were around a dozen deaths at the hands of the police each year in 2013 and 2014, even if one talks much less about them than across the Atlantic.”
“The socialist government has changed the tone a little, but in reality it's the Sarkozy-era practices that remain,” says a senior civil servant, who asked to remain anonymous. Though the expression is banished from the vocabulary of Manuel Valls and Bernard Cazeneuve, the culture of policing by figures still pervades in the police hierarchy. “At a day-to-day level the [police] service chiefs still look at the figures that are sent up to headquarters, there is still the same pressure,” says sociologist Sébastien Roché.
The only experiments that have taken place have been local ones in the priority ZSP zones. “There is paralysis in the political system even though paradoxically the institution [editor's note, the police services] is ready to listen to a certain amount of criticism,” says sociologist Christian Mouhanna. “During the conference on police training [editor's note, the Assises de la Formation de la Police Nationale held in February 2013] some police officers played their part and brought with them some genuine reflection. They were able to appreciate from first-hand experience under Sarkozy that zero tolerance didn't work. But nothing is happening.”
Instead, within the forces of law and order it is the image of the hunter that is extolled. “They are warriors,” one senior regional official commented about how local police forces often see themselves. Meanwhile those units whose job it is to defuse tensions and take part in dialogue with locals are seen as “social workers”. “There need to be some very major changes in policing philosophy,” says sociologist Fabien Jobard. “All the time that we're not telling police officers when they arrive at training college that they will chase very few robbers, that they will arrest very few criminals in the act of committing a crime, that they will rarely use force, that they will have to listen to and win the trust of people who are in difficult circumstances, because the police are often the administrative service of last resort, then we won't get there. For a decade politicians have only spoken of the police in warlike and macho terms.”
Associations on the ground - from the collective Stop le Contrôle aux Faciès to the Open Society Justice Initiative – appear to be running up against a brick wall. Even though they themselves are showing a desire to cooperate. “The demand for [stop and search] 'receipts' is not about having a go at the cops, on the contrary,” says Shihame Assbague of Stop le Contrôle aux Faciès. “If I were interior minister I would make sure that the police had the means to do their job. Is it natural that they can no longer go into some neighbourhoods, that they no longer feel safe, that young people start to run when they see them?” When asked what is blocking progress in this area, Shihame Assbague first advances two reasons, the influence of the police as an institution and the constant ratcheting up of language on law and order by politicians. “It's those who pledge most on security issues who get elected, with security meaning repression,” she says. But Shihame Assbague also puts forward a third reason. “Police abuses principally affect a section of the population that the politicians disregard,” she says.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter