Police control. This English report inspired the French police

More than 25 years after the first report on institutional racism in the English police concluded, a member of England’s House of Lords, Louis Casey, launched an inquiry into the police in London. The result was bad: the London police were accused of being racist, homophobic and sexist.

What explains the initiation of this investigation by the English police and specifically in London?

First, you have to put it in context. There was a whole series of scandals that preceded the writing of this report: police misconduct, kidnapping, rape and murder of a woman, or an officer being convicted of rape.
In January 2023, a police officer was convicted as a serial rapist. London’s police force, a sizable police force of 40,000 officers, has run into deep questions about the level of public trust that has plummeted in recent years over these scandals. So the London police set up an independent investigation team with substantial evidence.

How did the trial go?

It is an independent framework based on observations from meetings, hundreds of interviews with London police officers and a questionnaire survey of former police officers. Also, the police and the public were surveyed. This is an important element in establishing the diagnosis and should be underlined. One immediately thinks implicitly of France, because we have no equivalent of this kind of independent investigation that mobilizes massive resources. When you need to base a diagnosis on, it’s critical to do this evaluative work by gathering different methods and cross-referencing sources. Here, in this case, the diagnosis is more severe.

Why is it so complicated to carry out this kind of survey in France?

The police have an unspoken tradition, an administrative tradition in France, of less transparency from the outside, less transparency. So it applies to the police, but also to public administration, which has a Napoleonic heritage. In England, we see the fear of the liberal tradition in the sense of political liberalism and the protection of rights. There is also a relationship to politics, which is not entirely uniform, especially since the police in England are regional police. While in France, the Minister of the Interior is often defined as France’s First Guard. Indeed, when you define yourself as the first policeman of France, paradoxically, you depend on the police because you are one of them. You are the first. Being in the UK, you have more of a tradition of distance, which can lead to a conservative prime minister taking very critical positions and endorsing systemic violence.

What observations are verified in France by this statement?

Domestic violence is one of the report’s findings [commises par des policiers] Not fully investigated by London police. Another observation is that there is a relaxation of professional standards, especially in the most prestigious units, the units that use weapons. Remember that only 10% of English police officers are armed. They are the ones who need to be checked the most, the statement said. In this case in England, armed units are less restricted. What is the problem with the police, it is not specific to the MET [La Metropolitan police, NDLR]. This is a question that obviously arises in France for a unit like Brav-M in similar terms.

Another problem with the report is how to truly eliminate agents who have made mistakes? There is a whole series of control and verification procedures. Ensure that agents who commit lapses in their service on or during entry into the profession may be removed from service. Each country and each force has unique procedures. In the Casey report, you have the whole issue of people not being trained for what they are doing. Of course, there are also very strong issues that we can have in France. It also raises the question of false identity checks on minorities, which is also highly problematic in France.

So a whole series of issues are still being raised that are common to what we know in France.

How to explain that in the UK such a damning report can be heard, and in France, it is so complicated to talk about structural problems in the police?

It is less controversial than in France. It is true that the consensus is that there are problems with policing in the United Kingdom, more so than in France. You still have a Conservative Prime MinisterYes, there are structural problems with the London Police“and”Yes, I share these conclusions about misogyny, racism, and homophobia, and we started doing it.“. No interior minister has ever made or published such critical comments about the police in France. While the British plan to radically reform the police, France has yet to launch an investigation to show structural problems.