Call to disband the French 'traffic wardens' who operate like a private 'militia'

InIn theory their role is similar to that of traffic wardens or parking enforcement officers. But municipal parking agents in one suburban town near Paris stand accused of operating a mobile security patrol that behaves like a parallel police force. The minister of the interior and the justice minister have now been urged to close the group down.

The existence of what some describe as a “militia” of traffic wardens was highlighted last month when a journalist was assaulted in the town of Montreuil to the east of Paris. The attack was said to have been carried out by local agents de surveillance de la voie publique (ASVP) who are agents employed by the mayor and whose powers are technically restricted to handing out parking tickets and monitoring the cleanliness of public spaces. ASVP agents require no formal training, nor is there an entrance examination, and they are not members of the municipal police.

Yet according to a number of witnesses and other evidence some AVSP agents in Montreuil are carrying out tasks that go well beyond their normal duties, such as patrolling in unmarked cars, policing public protests, evicting squatters and searching people attending council meetings. They have also been unlawfully carrying - and on some occasions are said to have used - tear gas spray canisters. The group is led by Denis Hochard who is in charge of public order for the town and who is a close ally of the mayor Dominique Voynet, a leading member of the green movement Europe Écologie – Les Verts and the Green candidate in the 2007 presidential election.

As a result of the incident last month Denis Hochard has been “temporarily” suspended by the mayor's office pending the results of an internal investigation and the journalist has lodged a formal legal complaint against Hochard for aggravated violence. The journalist's employers are also considering taking action, in particular in relation to interference with the freedom of the press.

The assault took place on 19th May 2013. Mikaël Lefrançois, a cameraman for press agency Tournez S'il Vous Plaît (TSVP) which specialises in TV documentaries, was working at 2am in the area around Montreuil's convention centre which was hosting a festival of electronic music. Lefrançois had already made a news documentary on municipal police forces which was broadcast on the M6 TV channel in January 2013, so he knew the subject matter well. At Montreuil he was surprised to see that some agents from the ASVP were carrying tear gas spray canisters on their belts.

“Mikaël wanted to take photos on his mobile phone as part of his work, and one of the agents ordered him in a very aggressive manner to delete the photos, even after he showed him his press card,” says Thibault Leguillon, a friend who was with him on the night. “He quickly got worked up because Mikaël refused.” When the agent, who had been photographed from behind, came back Mikaël Lefrançois realised that it was Denis Hochard, the head of public order for Montreuil, whom he said he knew by sight without ever having met him. His friend had the presence of mind to film what happened next.

In the first sequence of images an agent in a uniform with the words “tranquillité publique” or “public order” on the back demands in a very insistent manner that Mikaël Lefrançois deletes the photos. “I do what I want so the photo, you delete it. Fuck you,” says the agent, before grabbing him by the collar and pinning him against the wall while the young cameraman calls for help from a nearby police officer: “Sir, you're a municipal police officer, this is an abuse of power!” On a second clip timed at 02.04am on 19th May the journalist is seen being violently brought to the ground by several ASVPs, watched by a municipal police officer. As a result of this incident Lefrançois suffered bleeding to his right eye – which was noticed the following morning – and was signed off work for three days.

The cameraman also says he received an electric shock to his hand which was “of low intensity but enough to make me drop the phone”. His friend Thibault Leguillon adds: “They put their knee in his face, it was violent.” On the video a man – Denis Hochard according to the cameraman – can be heard shouting: “I'm 52, sunshine. No guy your age is going to piss me around. You will now give me the code for your phone and we will get rid off the photos that you took of me. That's how life is because here, we're in France, and there are laws.” And the man is heard threatening: “I'm going to smash your face in. Get stuffed, boy! I'm going to shove your phone up your arse.”

Once the cameraman was released, and having noted that his friend had filmed the scene, he did finally give the code to unlock the phone keyboard, still feeling threatened by the agents. “Denis Hochard gave me back the phone telling me that there were lots of dark alleyways in Montreuil and it would be too bad if we came across each other one day,” says Mikaël Lefrançois. He said that he took the matter up in situ with national police officers, a municipal police officer and a member of the mayor's staff, who all told him they had not seen the incident.

The head of Dominique Voynet's office initially told AFP news agency that the journalist “seemed a bit spaced out” and had insulted the agents, accusing them of being “fascists” and “vigilantes”. But, after the publication of this article in French, Voynet condemned the behaviour of the agents, including Hochard, and issued a public apology. 

The preliminary inquiry into the incident will be carried out by officers from the national police based in the Seine-Saint-Denis département – roughly equivalent to a country – which covers this area “in view of the nature of the people involved”, says the local prosecution service. Officials at the Seine-Saint-Denis prosecution service add that they have not previously been alerted to any alleged abuses committed by parking officials in Montreuil.

In the photographs taken on the night of the assault (see above) an aerosol spray canister with a yellow trigger can be seen on the belt of one of the two ASVP agents, next to a Maglite torch – a type favoured by private security guards. According to representatives of the two municipal police unions contacted by Mediapart, the Union syndicale professionnelle des policiers municipaux (USPPM) and the Syndicat National des Policiers Municipaux-Force Ouvrière (SNPM-FO), the aerosol can only be a 500 ml tear gas spray. This belongs to what is known in France as a category 6 weapon which means it can be freely sold, but that carrying or transporting one is unlawful unless a person has a professional or other legitimate reason to do so.

The law is clear on this. The then minister of the interior Claude Guéant said in April 2012 in response to a written parliamentary question that “ASVP [agents] cannot be armed and there are no plans to change this, in particular [we want to] avoid any confusion with other local agents who do have police functions and who can be armed under certain conditions and after having to undergo rigorous training, which the ASVP are not obliged to do”.

However, any lapses are rarely punished, with the prefects – local state officials with responsibility for law and order - and the judiciary preferring to turn a blind eye. At the start of May 2013 the USPPM union did succeed in getting the AVSP disarmed at Soisy-sous-Montmorency in the Val-d’Oise département north of Paris. They, too, had been illegally equipped with tear gas sprays. But this only happened after a long delay; the union had first notified the prefecture in the Val-d’Oise two years earlier.

A 'mobile unit' of traffic wardens

 Denis Hochard was hired as the head of 80 agents in the public order department at Montreuil – which contains both the ASVP and the municipal police – after Dominique Voynet was elected as mayor in 2008. “He was in her security detail during the [election] campaign and especially on the evenings of the first and second rounds [of the election],” recalls Alexandre Tuaillon, president of the local opposition Renouveau socialiste, which is allied to the Socialist Party. Hochard can be spotted in several TV reports covering Voynet's victory on 16th March 2008. Equipped with an earpiece and with a rucksack on his shoulder, he is seen with two or three other men protecting the new mayor.

 At the time Denis Hochard still belonged to the security team at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, from where he went on leave of absence in July 2009, according to an employee of the centre. “There were already the same problems at that time, with some strange behaviour, so we wanted to part company with him,” says the staff member, who also mentioned a private security firm that Mediapart has been unable to trace. However, Hochard does appear to have run an adult training company called Avant-garde Formation SARL, which was wound down in September 2011.

 According to the former mayor, communist Jean-Pierre Brard, since Hochard's arrival in Montreuil the public order department has grown in power with the number of ASVP agents rising from five to 20. “Even I wasn't able to work out exactly how many there were, because some of them were on the payroll of other services,” says Bruno Saunier, former assistant mayor in charge of personnel and then deputy mayor. “Everyone was hired on very short contracts, which obviously was a means of adding pressure.” Saunier, a teacher, quit in May 2011 in disagreement with Dominique Voynet's methods as mayor. According to witnesses in Montreuil the latest recruits were “tough” types.

Over the same period the number of municipal police, a service that the previous mayor had created in 2007, has not changed. It has five unarmed officers, a small number for a town with a population of 102,770. In fact Dominique Voynet has never hidden her opposition to the development of local police forces and to arming them “even with a tear gas spray or a tonfa [editor's note, handled stick]” as she told Le Parisien in June 2010. “Because the maintenance of law and order and the safety of citizens are functions that belong to the state,” she said in the interview. “The problem is that this same state has gradually disengaged on this issue and some mayors have had to create a municipal police force. That's a trap that I refuse to fall into.”

However, a month later a mobile unit of around ten ASVP “volunteers” began operating in Montreuil. “They have staggered working hours, sometimes going up to midnight,” says Bruno Saunier. “They have drawn up a list of the squats and go around in unmarked cars, white Clios. They're there when the national police expel [squatters] and sometimes expel them themselves.”

A former employee of the service explains that while a section of the ASVP agents continues to do “their core work, in other words giving parking tickets”, the mobile unit patrols regularly “with the national police in the housing estates, well beyond the pay parking zones”. The former employee, who asked to remain anonymous, adds: “Denis Hochard really liked going around in unmarked cars on operations and running after offenders. One day he even broke his foot running after someone.”

At the time Renouveau socialiste opposition councillors were already quite unhappy with the mayor over this confusion of roles. “After reading a report on activities that was brought to our attention we noticed that the ASVP has in recent months been handed roles which seemed to go too far in blurring functions: 'operations at the rubbish tip', 'surveillance following break-ins',” they stated on their opposition blog. “There were problems with Roma people taking stuff from the tip which created tensions with the [rubbish tip] staff who called in their colleagues from public order,” explains Alexandre Tuaillon. “Same thing with the break-ins at council buildings. In fact, Dominique Voynet sends the public order [unit] and Denis Hochard as soon as there is a problem in the town, whether it's a squat, demonstration, etc. But this exposes them to tasks for which they are neither trained nor have legal protection.”

Former mayor Jean-Pierre Brard says: “Dominique Voynet uses [the ASVP] for anything. She uses them for public demonstrations and public order, in particular for council meetings where the ASVP search members of the public to see what they have on them.” Here again, these are the functions of police officers and gendarmes, which cannot be carried out by other agents apart from in certain very restricted circumstances. The USPPM and the SNPM-FO unions say the head of the municipal police, who has been put under the command of Denis Hochard, has already alerted the mayor's office to the abuses at the heart of the ASVP service.

Expelling squatters

According to witnesses and other evidence, last month's attack on the TSVP cameraman is far from being the first incident involving ASVP agents. On 2nd May 2013 Franck Boissier, who is the radical left Parti de gauche's departmental boss, says that he was pinned to the ground and sprayed with tear gas by ASVP agents when Front de gauche members opened a council room “for the night” for Roma families who had been evicted from a private industrial wasteland site that very morning.

“The ASVP agents were in front of the door, partly blocking it to stop other Roma people from entering,” says Franck Boissier. “I wanted to help some Roma people to force their way through but without being aggressive, and I was violently pinned to the ground and sprayed with gas. Denis Hochard only arrived afterwards and was very polite.”

The episode is also described on a Parti de gauche blog written by a party activist. But despite having to take two days off work, Boissier decided against making a formal complaint with the authorities feeling that “the ASVP agents did not do this on their own initiative” and had “certainly received an order”. He adds: “You wonder if they're there for the local authority or whether they're a political police force.” In Le Figaro on 3rd May the head of Dominique Voynet's office Sébastien Maire said that the mayor's office was going to lodge a complaint for “insulting [council] agents and attempted assault”.

In December 2012, meanwhile, activists from the Parti de gauche and the far-left anti-capitalist party the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (NPA) say they were confronted by security guards and by several members of the mayor's office during the official opening of the new market in Montreuil. “We were protesting against the closure of local health centres and they sent in the ASVP who 'charged' us,” says Nathanaël Uhl, a Parti de gauche activist who adds that he noticed that the agents were equipped with tear gas spray canisters.

Activists involved in local housing issues also say they have had dealings with the AVSP agents in Montreuil. In late February 2012 Roma families who had been evicted from the same industrial site mentioned earlier had found shelter in a council room at 50 avenue de la Résistance in Montreuil. According to the housing workers the women and children refused to leave the room despite the intervention of the ASVP. The witnesses say that Denis Hochard and another man in a helmet then entered the room and that after some cries and shouts everyone eventually came out, before the national police had time to arrive. The activists say that one woman complained that she had been hit in the chest.

On a video clip taken with a mobile phone just after the Roma people had left the room (see video clip above and screen grabs below), Hochard can be seen at the entrance to the room, helmet in hand, talking with another man in plain clothes. He is probably Thierry Satiat, the former police chief for Montreuil. Hochard is flanked by two ASVP agents and a municipal police officer. Behind him, in the building itself, there is a man still in a helmet and who is also dressed like a motorcyclist.

Yet another incident took place on 31st January 2012 when housing activists claim they witnessed a markedly more violent scene during the eviction of squatters from an old furnished accommodation block at rue de Vincennes in Montreuil. On a “video report” (see video and screen grabs below) made by “some Montreuil inhabitants” men can be seen smashing up the inside of the building, taking down window frames and breaking the glass panes with their torches amid general commotion. It is dark, as the incident was filmed in late afternoon.

Around ten officers in uniform – from the national police according to a witness – are guarding the front of the building. A few moments later an image shows several ASVP agents armed with iron bars leaving the building. They are followed by a helmeted man in a motorbike jacket who is, according to the commentary, Denis Hochard.

Activists who have been interviewed say the ASVP's role that day was to “do the dirty work”. In other words, to clear the squats after the 48 hour window that the courts allow the police to intervene in such cases had expired. “The video did the rounds of the offices at the start of 2012, people said that Denis Hochard had overstepped the mark there,” recalls one former worker at the mayor's office.

Finally, in February 2010 ASVP agents accompanied by a dog handler apparently used similar methods to clear a former factory bought by the town on a future industrial development zone and which had been occupied by a man for 48 hours. According to the same housing activist witnesses the ASVP carried out what amounted to a siege of the place, with its occupant, who was bitten by a dog and tear-gassed, refusing to come out. “Denis Hochard made a right hash of it, the person was shut up inside and things turned really ugly,” says Bernard Saunier, who says he later intervened with a member of the mayor's office.

'Disband this militia'

Frédéric Foncel, who is secretary general of the SNPM-FO municipal police union, insists the mobile patrol unit set up in Montreuil is nothing other than a “group of heavies put in place to do the clearing up work in a town”. He adds: “It's certainly easier to use these people for some particular tasks than municipal police officers who operate under statute and who would refuse to carry out illegal operations.”

In a letter to the minister of the interior and the minister of justice the SNPM-FO and the USPPM have called for the “immediate disbanding of this militia formed by Madame Voynet”. They also demand the “immediate taking in for questioning of any local official who, without the right to do so, uses a weapon while carrying out his functions”.

In the view of Bernard Vellutini, president of the USPPM, more than one person bears responsibility for what has gone on at Montreuil. “It seems unlikely that the [council] administration or even the services of the state could not have noticed that the public servants were, in the course of their service, and in an obvious way, carrying sixth category arms, in this case incapacitating tear gas sprays that were of a significant size and hard to conceal...”

After this article was first published in French, Dominique Voynet issued a statement in which she “strongly condemns the circumstances of the involvement of agents of the town of Montreuil during an altercation on the fringes of a festival on the night of 18th to 19th May and just as strongly condemns the threatening behaviour and the insulting and crude language used by the town's director of public order on this occasion”.

The mayor said she reaffirmed her desire to punish any abuses committed and said she would put an end to any “irregularities” highlighted by this incident in the way the service operated, announcing a review of its operations. Voynet also apologised to anyone – and in particular Mikaël Lefrançois - who had “suffered from the attitude of agents who have, however, no other vocation or purpose than to guarantee the order of public spaces and the security of the inhabitants of Montreuil”.

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English version by Michael Streeter