Beyond the individual tragedies, the murders of two police officers in Rambouillet and Avignon challenge. On May 19, the police unions will demonstrate in front of the National Assembly, demanding, among other things, “The implementation of minimum sentences for law enforcement aggressors”. Many elected officials and political representatives have also called for more staff and resources.
But does a new hardening of the repression of violence committed against them really constitute a response equal to the deterioration of the conditions of intervention revealed by these facts?
The penalties incurred are already very high
Thus, it should be remembered that the penalties incurred for crimes committed against police officers are already the highest possible in a democratic society, so much so that all of the proposals reforms announced by the government are already in force.
Punishable by life imprisonment, the murder of a police officer exposes the perpetrator to a period of safety – that is, the period during which the sentence cannot be adjusted – of 30 years since 2011, while the abolition of sentence reduction credits for those convicted in this capacity has just been adopted by Parliament.
As recent events have tragically demonstrated, the continued increase in penalties imposed by the legislator in recent years has no deterrent effect. Likewise, the accusations of lax judicial response brandished by certain police unions do not stand up to examination of the facts: since the turn of the century, the prison population has grown by 60%, while the average length of prison sentences did not stop rising, for offenses committed to the detriment of police officers as well as to others.
The bidding contributes to the crisis of the authority of the police force
It appears all the less appropriate to continue on the path of repressive escalation as this largely contributes to the crisis of the authority of the police forces and, consequently, to the increase of the risk that they are victims of aggression. The overbidding tends to present the institution as being above the law, thus breaking the bond of trust which should unite it with the population.
The republican penal model which is supposed to be ours was indeed built on the model of strict equality before the law and, in particular, the submission of public officials to the same legal framework as other citizens. This is why the penalties incurred for offenses committed by police officers are increased in the same way as those committed against them.
However, the public authorities today seem to want to build a real right of exception for the repression of the latter. A trend that can be observed in the recent evolution of the legal framework and in particular the desire to reduce the possibilities of reducing the sentence of persons convicted of a crime committed against a person holding public authority , whereas such a measure normally aims to take into account the behavior of the person in detention, whatever the nature of the offense committed.
A pressurization
But it is especially at the stage of the application of the law that this logic of exception manifests itself, at the risk of affecting the right to a fair trial of persons suspected or accused of a crime against a police officer.
The government has thus ad a new circular of penal policy to order the magistrates, from the stage of the investigation, to a rapid and exemplary repression of the denounced facts. A pressure which can only affect the objective impartiality of the procedure, which supposes that the institutional and material conditions in which it takes place guarantee the absence of prejudice.
This risk of expeditious justice is all the more problematic since, at the same time, real obstacles continue to hamper the effective sanction of the abusive use of force committed by certain police officers, as evidenced by opinion of the defender of rights, but also the recurrent condemnation of France by the European Court of Human Rights as such.
An imbalance that feeds the logic of mistrust
In the end, such an imbalance can only strengthen the logic of mistrust and confrontation between the police and the population which prevails today and which greatly contributes to the deterioration of its operating conditions.
It is therefore this mistrust that must be remedied as a priority if we want to effectively restore the authority of the institution, a necessary condition for a more peaceful exercise of its missions. As such, there are police demands which, although they receive less media coverage than the positions taken in favor of an endless increase in the repressive arsenal, nonetheless reflect the aspirations of many agents.
In the first place, we could take seriously the request for the police to refocus on their “core business”. The last two decades have seen a continuous extension of the field of intervention of the police, from school disorders to street vendors, including begging police or even that of stairwells…
Police officers on the front line
Placed on the front line in the fight against the forms of deviance with which the public authorities are confronted, the police officers are struggling to find the appropriate responses to what is above all an educational or medico-social response and therefore become the first targets for the number of recriminations in the population.
By allowing them to concentrate on their missions of clarifying offenses and securing public space, by ensuring that their intervention is only required when other forms of response are manifestly insufficient, we would not only work to restore their authority, but also to give them greater control over their conditions of intervention.
The same observation can be made with regard to law enforcement operations. Criticized because of the role it has played in the explosion of violence during the demonstrations on the public highway that we have observed since 2016, the official doctrine is also widely contested internally due to the deprofessionalization of the security of the public space that it induces, involving alongside the mobile gendarmes and republican security companies agents who have received no training or preparation.
Nicolas Tucat / AFP
Revising this doctrine in depth to replace a logic of confrontation with a logic of dialogue and de-escalation involving exclusively the officers trained for this purpose would, again, jointly strengthen the authority of the police institution and the conditions for intervention. of its agents.
As already noted Cesare Beccaria, author in the XVIIIe century of the famous Treaty of misdemeanors and penalties, claiming to prevent the commission of certain acts by their simple penalization constitutes a “chimera pursued by men with limited faculties when they have power in their hands”.
Dealing with the crisis that the police and, more broadly, our repressive system are going through today, presupposes less a new punitive incantation than concrete and pragmatic responses.
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