Mediapart has obtained the draft text of a new professional code of ethics for French police forces, which sets out both the duty of officers towards the population at large, and also their required obedience to their hierarchy regarding freedom of expression.
Police unions and gendarmerie representatives are to meet with the interior ministry to discuss the 11-page text later this week, before a final version is published in the form of a decree, due in March 2013.
In a process set underway by the previous conservative government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, is the first time the code has been reviewed since it was introduced in 1986 by the then socialist interior minister, Pierre Joxe.
Importantly, it now applies to the gendarmerie as well as the national police force, after the former was brought under the authority of the interior ministry in 2009. Prior to then, the gendarmerie, which broadly polices rural and semi-urbain areas, was managed by the defence ministry, although it still remains technically a corps of the armed services.
One of the chapters of the new code of ethics, which is a much more detailed document than its predecessor, is dedicated to defining the relationship between police and gendarmerie officers and the public. “Police officers and military personnel of the gendarmerie are placed at the service of the population”, the text stresses. It prohibits any disrespectful use of language, notably “any tutoiement”, referring to the practice of addressing someone in the intimate form of “you” in French, which is tu, instead of the formal vous.
Above: The draft code of ethics document under discussion (in French only). Scroll down to read full text.
“There was not really any reason to change [the original code of ethics],” commented Michel-Antoine Thiers, national secretary of the largest union representing police officers, the SCSI (Syndicat des cadres de la sécurité intérieure), who received the draft text along with other union officials and gendarmerie representatives earlier this month. “It’s more of an inventory of what is already around elsewhere, notably the criminal law procedure code.”
The draft text includes two specific articles on the practice of identity controls and random body searches, or frisking.
A mooted plan requiring officers to deliver a documented record of a ‘stop and search’ incident to the person subjected to it, as is the practice in the UK and the US, was rejected earlier this year by interior minister Manuel Valls, who argued that it was “much too bureaucratic and heavy to manage, and opens up new legal difficulties.” Announcing his decision in September, he referred to the new code of ethics as one answer to containing police abuse of their stop and search powers, (Valls also called for the issuing by police chiefs of a strict reminder to officers about the limits of their powers in such operations, and improving the visibility of their official identity numbers on uniforms).
Whenever possible, body searches, or frisking, should be carried out “hidden from public view”, the text stipulates. This partly addressed a sharply critical report on the manner in which ID controls and body searches are carried out, published in October by France’s Defender of Rights (Défenseur des droits), the official ombudsman for the protection of civil rights, Dominique Baudis, who wrote that the frisking of individuals caused “as many objections as the ID controls themselves, because of their intrusive, hurtful and even humiliating character”.
Limits to officers' freedom of expression
The new code of ethics leaves to the discretion of police officers the decision whether or not to search an individual, and which is justified “in cases where they judge it necessary regarding the guarantee of their own safety or that of others”.
That advice was described as “vague” by the SCSI union's Michel-Antoine Thiers, who warned that “it will therefore be a source of dispute.”
In an effort to tackle criticism that police often target subjects for stop and search checks on the basis of racial or religious appearance, the new ethics code requires that ID checks must not be carried out on the basis of a “physical characteristic or [the wearing of an outwardly] distinctive sign, except when the check is motivated by a particular description.” It also underlines that, by law, “no-one can be made to completely undress, except for the case of searching for proof of a crime or offence as allowed for under penal law”.
“Police officers do nothing other than to answer the demands of politicians,” said Stéphane Liévin, national secretary of the Unité SGP Police FO, the largest union representing the lower ranks of the police, the gardiens de la paix (officers who patrol the beat). “Police were singled out for criticism over racial profiling and the amount of detentions for questioning, but the latter were established as [statistical] indicators by the previous government,” “It is in this general climate that the police have become distanced from the population.”
Liévin underlined that the former federation of police unions, the FASP, was instrumental in highlighting the rights of citizens before the police, and in drawing up the original code of ethics. “The predecessors in the FASP participated in its writing, and to the displaying in police stations of the Declaration of Human and Citzens’ Rights, issues we are in support of acting as a framework for a profession that has a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence.”
Meanwhile, where the text of the original 1986 code of ethics began by addressing the duty of police officers towards citizens and public institutions, the new draft opens with a text on “the hierarchical principle”, with a reminder of the limits imposed on officers’ rights to public expression of their views. Four articles of the new text are dedicated to “professional secrecy and discretion”.
One of them states that “at every moment, whether they be on duty or not, and including when they express opinion via the social media networks, [the police or gendarmerie officer] refrains from any action, expression or behavior that might be of a nature that damages the consideration with which the national police force or the gendarmerie are held.”
Without defining what is subject to professional secrecy, the text stresses: “The police officer is bound by professional secrecy. The exercise of union rights, which allow them to express themselves more broadly, does not free them of this requirement.”
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English version: Graham Tearse