France's tough cops wield a new weapon: culture

France's tough cops wield a new weapon: culture

They are accused of being violent, corrupt, racist. Now the police are answering back with a wave of novels, memoirs and music that challenges the stereotypes

Jason Burke in Paris
Sunday July 1, 2007
The Observer


It is a dark evening in a police station on the outskirts of Paris. A light is still on in the chief superintendent's office. Philippe Pichon, the 37-year-old chief superintendent, is hunched over documents laid out on a table. But he's not reading interrogations or the reports from a surveillance operation - he is correcting his latest manuscript.
Pichon, senior policeman, poet, novelist and now best-selling author, is the standard-bearer of a new wave of French cops turning to the world of literature and music to voice their grievances.
'A poet can be a policemen and a policeman can be a poet,' Pichon, chief of a police station with 85 staff, told The Observer last week. 'I am an exalted humanist. Every day on the streets I see the true humanity of things, and I recount them in my work.'
Along with Pichon's recently published 400-page work on the daily life and existential angst of a senior French policeman, the first ever published by a serving high-ranking officer, comes a spate of other works by a generation dubbed 'creative cops'.

They range from other personal testimonies and meditations on what it means to be a policeman, a 100-page cartoon series created by a 45-year-old veteran agent in the French equivalent of MI5 that details his missions tracking down Islamic militants in Paris, scores of personal or station blogs, to a rap album by an anonymous 'brigadier' posted in the internet.

'This is a totally new phenomenon,' said Frederic Ploquin, a crime correspondent and police expert. 'Before, the only people writing books were retired senior commissioners and your average plod was just a worker or peasant. Now a new generation of police with university degrees and culture are finding ways to express themselves while still serving in the force.'

Benedicte Desforges, a chief inspector on the outskirts of Paris, is one. Her personal blog starts with a poem on the solitude of the police, 'as anonymous as the roads... the bitumen washed in rain, tears and blood'. Her book, Flic, which was commissioned by an editor who read her work on the internet, is now on the bestseller lists.

Less critical than Pichon, who will next week publish an open letter to President Nicolas Sarkozy in the left-wing newspaper Liberation, Desforges - one of the few senior female police officers in France - explained that she hoped simply to make the daily life of the flics known to their compatriots. 'There are a lot of prejudices. People think all police are racists, violent, corrupt. Our popular image is completely at odds with the truth,' she said last week.

The eruption of literary endeavour - a work on the 'true cost of crime' by another senior officer came out last week and a book by the new head of the nation's criminal investigation department will be released in September - is about more than a sudden surge of frustrated writers in uniform. It is about deep discontent among French police.

France has two main police forces, the gendarmes who maintain law and order in the countryside and the 150,000 employees of the national police who are under the control of the Minister of the Interior, who, between 2002 and March, this year was Nicolas Sarkozy himself.

A controversial hardliner, the future President's tough language and insistence on boosting arrest statistics riled many. 'The police got caught in the crossfire [between politicians and the population],' said Desforges, who, like Pichon, did not seek official permission before writing her book.

One particular row has raged over community policing, rejected both by Sarkozy and his successor at the Interior Ministry, Michele Alliot-Marie.

Last month Alliot-Marie told policemen in the troubled department of Seine and St Denis, just north of Paris, that they 'were not there to play football with a few kids' but 'to protect locals and crack down on delinquents'.

In his book Pichon, who worked for many years in Seine and St Denis, explains how only a respectful police force working together with local populations can bring down crime levels. 'In England you conceive of the police as a service, in France the police are there to keep order,' he said.

The minister's comments came in the wake of a report by an official think tank sponsored by the Interior Ministry that criticised a 'culture of statistics' and recommended a strategy based more on consent. If nothing changed, the report said, there was a risk of an 'unleashing of violence'.

Another reason for the series of books by serving policemen is the lack of other ways of voicing grievances, some officers claim. Though, historically, the French police as an institution has been very bad at communication, Sarkozy as Interior Minister was a 'master of the media'.

'He monopolised the entire public debate about security and the police. No one else got a word in,' said one analyst. 'It's not surprising that the lid is blowing off now.'

Others say that, with the police unions preoccupied with basic questions of pay and conditions of work, more important issues go undiscussed. One of Pichon's key complaints is the 'quantitative not qualitative' treatment of crime. 'It has been reduced to a game of numbers,' he said.

According to Marc Gautheron, head of one major police union, the 'statistics culture' has 'rotted the life of the police officer'.

'Fighting delinquency is a team effort, but they have given us individual objectives,' he said. 'Everyone ends up looking out for himself... and it's like that that you end up with idiocies like nicking people for a gram of hash.'

The most acerbic of the flood of recent publications is Jamel the CRS, by a member of France's infamous riot control units. A former delinquent in one of the violent areas around Paris which saw protracted rioting 18 months ago, Jamel Bousetta, 25, joined the police because he wanted to see 'life from the other side'. The book details a series of racist and violent incidents, particularly in a centre dealing with asylum-seekers, that culminate in the author himself being beaten up by his colleagues.

'There are lots of policemen who are cowboys, who dispense justice themselves; there are drunkards, racists,' Boussetta told The Observer. 'I saw people spitting in the food of the detained asylum-seekers, making them stand naked, humiliating them, I saw violence, I saw falsified statistics and I saw petty daily corruption.'

The books have been received positively by the mainstream media. Pierre Dragon's cartoon description of life as an agent of the Renseignements Generaux was praised by the cultural website Evene for its 'references to Chandler and Melville'.

And, despite their warts-and-all portrait of French policing, it appears that support for the creative cops among their colleagues is widespread, a reflection in part of the respect in which writers are held in France generally.

Erik Blondin, a constable or gardien de la paix for the last 25 years, spent yesterday treading the pavements of Paris's 14th arrondissement, dealing with minor traffic incidents, stolen handbags and the occasional fight.

'It's daily human life,' he said during a short break. 'It's important for the police, for democracy and for everyone that these voices are heard.'