French president Emmanuel Macron went to a Paris police station on Tuesday night to thank officers deployed to quell riots sparked by the fatal shooting of a teenager. But if he expected the visit to blunt recent tensions with law enforcement, he was probably disappointed.
Many police officers were unhappy that soon after the shooting, which was caught on a video that went viral, Macron called the death of the teenager “inexplicable and inexcusable”, as official investigations were still under way.
“The police today have totally lost faith in the president,” Grégory Joron, the head of the second-largest labour union in the police, Force Ouvrière, said in an interview. “He eroded the ability of the justice system to work independently.”
It was a risky move for Macron to weigh in on the death of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk: the police are one of the most powerful institutions in France and he needed them to defuse the explosion of anger in the streets.
Police themselves have taken ever more extreme positions, however. Their two biggest unions put out an incendiary statement this week in which they said stronger action was needed to fight the “hordes of savages” and “pests” who were rioting.
“Today the police is in battle because we are at war,” they said, echoing statements made by parties on the far right.
Criticising law enforcement has long been taboo across much of the political class because of the role they have played in responding to several terrorist attacks since 2015, as well as other periods of social upheaval. During Macron’s period in office, these have notably included the anti-government gilets jaunes protest movement.
His government has expanded police powers, including increasing the use of drones and surveillance cameras and allowing closer tracking of mosques suspected of harbouring radical Islamists.
“The president has always been supportive of law enforcement,” said a government official, adding that the police budget has also increased.
Yet leftwing politicians, activist groups, and institutions such as the Council of Europe have questioned French policing tactics and culture.
Earlier this year during protests against Macron’s pensions reform, a UN official urged French police to avoid excessive force, and the EU’s human rights watchdog criticised the crackdown.
To disperse crowds and control protests, French police rely on tear gas, stun grenades and so-called LBD guns, which fire rubber bullets — tactics that critics call heavy-handed.
Police received another volley of criticism after the death of Merzouk, who was of north African descent.
“This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement,” said UN human rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani at a briefing in Geneva on Friday.
Recent debate has also centred on a 2017 law that broadened the circumstances under which traffic police could use deadly force to shoot at fleeing motorists. Police unions had long lobbied for the change but at the time the Defender of Rights, an independent administrative body, warned that it would make the rules more confusing.
The leftwing Nupes alliance in French parliament has called for an immediate repeal of the law, which it accused police of interpreting as a “licence to kill”.
For now, it does not appear that such a policy response is on the cards.
Macron’s government has described the killing of Merzouk, who prosecutors said was driving without a licence and committed traffic violations, as an isolated incident with no racial element.
In a rare step, however, the officer involved in the shooting is in pre-trial detention and preliminary charges have been filed against him for voluntary homicide.
Many black and Arab young people who live in the low-income suburbs, the banlieues, say they face discrimination by police. A 2017 report found that young men from minority backgrounds were 20 times more likely to be stopped for an identity check than the rest of the population.
Public support for the police has not been waning, however. Recent polling from Elabe shows that 71 per cent say they trust the police, although support is much lower among the young and those on the left.
The impact of the 2017 law extending the use of lethal force by traffic police has been disputed: publicly available data on shootings is scarce, since the police do not disclose it and have declined to give academics access to the information.
The government official claimed that there had not been a “notable change in the number of shots fired” by police at moving cars since the reform. Last year, 13 people were killed in such police shootings of motorists, according to the official, a record in a country where police shootings remain rare. This year to date there have been three, including Merzouk.
But according to data compiled and analysed by Sebastian Roché, a sociologist specialising in police practices, there have been six times more fatal police shootings of drivers in the five years since the 2017 reform compared with the five years before.
“The law is the principal problem, so the solution must be to change it,” Roché said. “My conclusion is that the legal change caused the increase — we controlled for other factors [including] the homicide rate, and compared to other countries.”
Police unions insist that officers need the discretion and clarity of the 2017 law. They have called instead for more firearms training, a weakness that government auditors have previously identified.
They also countered that the job of police officers has become more difficult. Attacks against police doubled in the two decades to 2021, according to government data analysed by Le Monde that year.
Since Merzouk was killed, 808 officers have been injured in clashes with protesters and rioters, according to the interior minister. In the banlieue, people used a familiar tactic of shooting fireworks at police, while 269 police stations were attacked.
Some officers have received threats, including against their family members. “It is very troubling . . . [and] it is worsening now,” said Thierry Clair, secretary-general of police union UNSA.
Union officials argued that police had worked tirelessly in difficult conditions over the past week to restore order as protests over Merzouk’s death spiralled into rioting, looting, and violent attacks against public buildings and officials.
In the fraught climate, they feel as if Macron should not undercut them. “We don’t expect him to support us, just not to hammer us down,” said Joron.
Additional reporting by Ian Johnston