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.
“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”.
