While French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has published his brand new national plan for maintaining law and order, Amnesty International pointed to the “illegal use of force” by French police officers during demonstrations in a recent report. In an interview with EURACTIV France, sociologist Jérémie Gauthier discusses why this is a recurrent issue in France.
Jérémie Gauthier is a sociologist at the University of Strasbourg and at the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin. He is a specialist on matters relating to the police in France and Germany.
Last week, a report published by Amnesty International accused the French police force and the public prosecutor’s office of having “exploited conflicting laws […] in order to fine, arbitrarily arrest and prosecute people who had not committed any violence”. Is the French police force more violent than elsewhere?
The lack of standardised indicators for measuring the use of police force and its consequences makes it difficult to compare between countries.
As far as France is concerned, data collected by NGOs and journalists indicate an undeniable brutalisation of policing, particularly when it comes to police management of protest crowds. Since 2 December 2019, i.e. since the start of the “Yellow Vests” movement, journalist David Dufresne has recorded four deaths, 344 head injuries, 29 disembowellings and five hands torn off. Demonstrators represent the majority of the victims, but journalists, high school students and passers-by are also among the victims.
Although Germany had experienced some fairly severe clashes between demonstrators and the police, during the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg, for example, the intensity of the clashes and the physical damage caused was much lower than in France.
The Amnesty International report you mentioned concerns another aspect: the judicial repression of individuals arrested before or during demonstrations. Between November 2018 and July 2019, around 11,000 individuals were held in police custody in this context, and more than half were released without prosecution.
The report is concerned about the infringements on the freedom to demonstrate produced by the criminalisation of certain practices (wearing swimming pool glasses or a mask, holding a banner etc). Breaking the protest mechanism by making it a criminal offence also exists in Germany, but again to a lesser extent than in France.
What is the reason for this escalation of violence?
Since the Yellow Vest movement started, the number of demonstrations has risen sharply. But that doesn’t explain everything. Less aggressive policing strategies in Germany and the extreme rarity of the use of maiming weapons used in France (grenades and defensive bullets) are the two main reasons for this increase in the number of people killed and injured, unprecedented since the demonstrations of 17 October 1961 – during which hundreds of Algerians were killed by the Paris police – and 8 February 1962, when nine people were killed.
Thousands of people have taken to Europe’s streets not only to protest the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the US but to denounce police brutality and structural racism, which is an issue on this side of the Atlantic as well.
If French police officers have heavy weapons, does this mean that they also receive more financial support from the state?
The comparison of budgets is difficult because the organisation and financing of the police differ so much between France and Germany.
One of the effects of this scarcity of resources is the great fragmentation of the police forces mobilised in recent years: during protests, we now find anti-crime brigades, community police units, and sometimes even police dog brigades. These various units will intervene during demonstrations even though they are not trained for that as it is not their main activity.
In Germany, where budgetary reserves are important, there is no need to fill in the gaps: the available manpower in policing ensures a numerical superiority over the protesters most of the time.
Demonstrations against police violence in the US have found a powerful echo in several European countries such as the UK and France… But not in Germany. Is the perception that Germans have of their police very different from that in France?
The surveys we have on police perception in these two countries put Germany ahead of France, whatever the indicators. For example, in 2017, 79% of those surveyed felt they had confidence in the French police. At the same time, approximately 86% of respondents in Germany said the same.
Between France and Germany, the most important difference is the sense of fairness. In France, this feeling collapses for the police: a minority of the respondents – around 40% according to the surveys – consider that the French police treat people equally, in particular because of their origin and/or skin colour.
Among respondents belonging to minority groups, judgements made about the French police are experiencing a strong erosion. In Germany, the police are perceived as a relatively egalitarian institution, regardless of the social group considered.
How can this crisis of confidence be explained?
For France, I wouldn’t call it a “crisis” but an “erosion” of confidence. On the other hand, there is a “crisis” in the feeling of fairness towards the police. Certain police practices constitute clear breaches of the principle of equality.
In France, identity checks, as well as physical violence, mostly target young black and Arab men, with equal rates of offences. Across the Rhine, differences in check rates between majority and minority groups are much smaller than in France.