fp | French police are plagued by “a double problem of racial discrimination and brutality, with neither one being acknowledged by governments past and present,” said Sebastian Roché, an expert on policing at Sciences-Po university in Grenoble.
In France, images of similar incidents “have emerged in the past, but not as damning as these ones,” said Éric Marliere, a sociologist at the University of Lille. “We are looking at a very violent scene that reminds of the George Floyd case” and has contributed to accelerating the protest movement, he said.
This is also yet another major headache for French President Emmanuel Macron, who’s seeking to rebuild his political capital at home and abroad after months of crippling strikes over his pension reform, and has now had to postpone a scheduled trip to Germany in order to deal with the new crisis, after being forced to leave early from a European summit in Brussels to hurry back to Paris last week.
French police have a long history of heavy-handedness, particularly with ethnic minorities. In the early 1960s, officers under the command of Paris police chief Maurice Papon killed dozens, if not hundreds, of Algerians taking part in a demonstration for independence. Over the following decades, the heavily immigrant, poverty- and crime-ridden suburbs at the margins of France’s biggest cities posed a constant challenge for police. But tensions between residents and security forces in the banlieues have grown worse over the past 15 years, according to Roché, particularly as a result of the 2005 riots.
Back then, “the police were taken by surprise and lost control of the situation,” he said. In the following years, under different governments, a new approach was developed to police the banlieues, he said, one that largely revolved around the tougher units—such as the anti-criminality brigades, which are specifically designed to carry out arrests and tend to attract the most hot-headed elements. Officers also started being equipped with “LBDs,” riot guns firing rubber bullets that can cause severe injuries or even death.
“The logic became: ‘The police aren’t there to connect with people, earn their trust, and reassure them, but to detain them,’” Roché said. “A police officer who arrives in a banlieue arrives with their LBD, in a position to impose their point of view by force and instill fear,” he said.
This approach continues to be in fashion today. In the thick of the recent violence, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA, two police unions, defined the rioters as “savage hordes” and “vermin,” against which police are “at war.”
In line with this rhetoric, French cops tend to be more trigger-happy than their European counterparts. The rough French average of 44 people killed by police every year since the turn of the decade pales compared to the hundreds who die in the United States, but it’s much higher than in Germany or the United Kingdom. Some of it may have to do with the lower standards and shorter training that have resulted from Macron’s efforts to quickly beef up police ranks after he came into office in 2017. In recent years, admission rates have gone from one in 50 candidates to one in five. New recruits are now only getting eight months of training, compared to three years in Germany.
