Emmanuel Macron has announced a national consultation on reforming the police amid concerns the force is losing the confidence of the French public.
The move comes after multiple allegations of police violence – several captured on film – in recent weeks and angry protests over a new law giving officers powers that critics say threaten civil and press freedom.
Police are also furious and have threatened industrial action after the president called them out on racial profiling.
“When you have a skin colour that is not white, you are stopped much more. You are identified as part of a problem. That cannot be justified,” Macron said last week in an interview that angered police unions.
The president is treading a fine line between balancing public and police concerns.
In a three-page letter to a police union leader he said there was an urgent need to reform the force.
He announced he would be calling a major consultation in January called the “Beauvau de securité”, after Place Beauvau, the Paris square that is home to the interior ministry that oversees the country’s forces of law and order.
“It is urgent to act to beef up the trust between the French and the police forces, while at the same time give police and gendarmes the means to meet their commitments and the expectations of our citizens,” Macron wrote to Yves Lefebvre, of the SGP-FO police union. Lefebvre, who had written to the president to express the force’s anger at his comments, welcomed his quick response.
“We’ve been asking for a profound reform of the police for months,” Lefebvre said.
The consultation, to be carried out by representatives from the police, elected representatives and community leaders, will begin in January. It will look at police training, equipment, staffing levels, the use of body cameras, relations with the public and making the force’s internal disciplinary body more independent.
In his letter, Macron said the consultation would tackle seven areas identified as areas for reform. It will also address longstanding complaints from police over working conditions.
The president said he would personally look at the issues.
Union leaders said they remained “circumspect” about the proposed consultation and the main union, Alliance, said it would not be responding to Macron’s invitation.
“Alliance would above all like those who protect us to be protected themselves,” the union’s secretary general, Fabien Vanhemelryck, told AFP. “We won’t be responding to President Macron’s invitation until he responds to our demands for police protections.”
Macron and his interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, have both said they were “shocked” by recent footage of police beating up music producer Michel Zecler inside his Paris studio and alleged assaults on migrants and journalists during the dismantling of a refugee camp in the city centre.
In an interview with Brut, a video news site, on Friday, Macron also announced plans to set up a website where people could report complaints of discrimination and said bodycams for police officers would be introduced from next June. However, he rejected the term “police violence” saying neither racism or violence were systemic in the force.
A poll by the Elabé Institute for BFMTV suggested 60% of French people have confidence in the police – down 9% on 2019 – and 64% said they believed only a minority of police were violent. Another poll by IFOP suggested the number of people confident of the police was as low as 37%.
On Saturday, a second “liberty march” to oppose the government’s global security law, which proposed making it illegal to film on-duty police and gendarmes with “intent” to cause them harm and allowing police to use drones and facial recognition at protests, was disrupted by hooded casseurs – anarchist troublemakers – who smashed and torched shops and vehicles and clashed with police.
