French police given authority to shoot drivers, but ‘not given any training’
For years, French police unions have argued that officers should be given more freedom to decide when to fire at fleeing motorists. Time and time again lawmakers refused.
Finally in 2017, after a series of terrorist attacks, the government admitted. Eager to crack down on crime and terrorism, lawmakers have a account allowing officers to fire at motorists fleeing traffic stops, even if the officers are not in immediate danger.
“For politicians, because this was real politics, it was hard to say no,” recalled Frédéric Lagache, a leader of the police union Alliance Police who strongly pushed for the law.
Since that law was passed, the number of fatal police shootings of motorists has increased sixfold, according to data recently collected by a team of French researchers and shared with The New York Times. Last year, 13 people were shot dead in their vehicles, a record in a country where police killings are rare.
The law has come under scrutiny again after a police officer killed a teenage driver during a traffic stoppage this week, shocking and inflaming the country street protests and riots. Various legislators to have called for a repeal or revision of the law.
Union leaders, including those who supported the bill, say training on what it allowed was woefully inadequate.
“We have not received any training,” Mr Lagache said. He and other police officers interviewed in the weeks and months leading up to this most recent deadly shooting said their classes were primarily online — video tutorials showing the situations in which cops shoot or don’t shoot — and covered theoretical topics that challenge reality. don’t take the field.
“We still have colleagues opening fire because they believe they are protected by the law when they are not,” said Yves Lefebvre, a union leader who helped negotiate the bill. “There’s inevitably some collateral damage.”
French police officials have not returned messages to comment on how officers are trained. Union members have an incentive to blame training, rather than their officers or a law they had supported.
a report Last year, the Cour des Comptes, France’s highest public audit office, found that nearly 40 percent of officers failed to meet the requirement to attend three shooting training sessions. That is separate from the 2017 law and carries no sanctions if ignored.
Following the recent shooting, French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has refused that the number of fatal shootings of fleeing motorists increased after the passing of the law, a claim refuted by the data collected by the French investigators.
Police experts and lawyers say the law and the spate of police shootings that followed are the unintended consequences of the French government’s response to terrorism and an increase in threats against the police.
“The law was passed to achieve the expected effects,” said Marie-France Monéger, the former head of a powerful police agency that investigates police services, referring to the fight against terrorism. “Then you have the unexpected effects and then you have the perverse effects.”
Suicide attacks in Paris in 2015, a deadly one truck attack in Nice in 2016 and a firebombing that seriously injured two police officers in a suburb of Paris that year led to calls for tighter security. The bill, which also allowed officers to shoot at fleeing suspects deemed a threat, passed overwhelmingly in February 2017.
But shooting at moving or speeding cars is a tactic many use cities are prohibited as too dangerous. For example, New York Police Department officers have been generally prohibited from shooting at cars since 1972.
“What France is doing is an anomaly in many ways,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based group whose members include police officers from major city, county and state forces.
In the past, French police officers were only allowed to fire at vehicles if the officers were in immediate danger, the same right of self-defense as any citizen. Police unions, a powerful politics power in France, however, argued that they should have broader authority to fight crime and have rules similar to those of the gendarmerie, a French police force with military status.
Now police can shoot if they think motorists could endanger lives while fleeing. Officers, the law says, may use their weapons in cases of “absolute necessity and in a strictly proportional manner”.
Catherine Tzutzuiano, a law professor at the University of Toulon, said the wording of the law “suggests that officers can use their guns more easily”.
The bill drew heavy criticism France’s defender of rightsan independent government ombudsman who oversees civil rights, and the National Advisory Committee on Human Rights, a United Nations-affiliated group that advises the French government. Both warned that the law’s vague wording could lead to more deadly shootings.
Those shootings increased almost immediately after it went into effect. In the first nine months, police shot and killed five motorists, more than in the five years before the law.
“In 2017, the wrong message was sent. We said, ‘Now you can shoot at cars,'” Laurent-Franck Liénard, a lawyer defending most of the 13 police officers involved in last year’s deadly traffic checks, said in a February interview. “That was total bullshit.” He said most of the officers involved were young recruits in their mid-20s who had limited shooting training.
Since 2017, said Mr. Liénard in the same interview, the situation has improved. Officers are more careful to only fire in self-defense, he said.
Mr Liénard said the officer involved in this week’s shooting, whom he also represents, was “shot under the law”. That officer has not been publicly identified.
The rising trend in fatal traffic stops since 2017 “is a really big deal, which has probably made France the European champion for fatal vehicle shootings,” said Sebastian Roché, a police expert at the country’s National Center for Scientific Research, who the data and shared it with The Times.
A research paper on the subject is being peer-reviewed by a US journal, he said, adding that the underlying numbers on shootings and traffic checks come from French police.
On average, France has recorded a fatal shooting every two-and-a-half months since the law was passed, compared to one every 16 months before the law came into effect — a six-fold increase.
French authorities and police unions have argued that this increase is mainly caused by a growing number of drivers refusing to stop and endangering the lives of others. The number of dangerous refusals to stop recorded by police has doubled between 2012 and 2021, according to official police data.
But that doesn’t explain the six-fold increase in the number of shootings.
The researchers also ruled out that the increase could be attributed to an overall rise in crime. They noted that, in contrast to the French national police, the number of fatal traffic checks had barely increased in the gendarmerie, the French military police and the police forces of Belgium and Germany, two countries with relatively similar murder rates to France.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Mr. Roche said. “The 2017 law that gives the police more powers is the cause of the increase in deadly police shootings.”
It remains unclear what training the officer involved in Tuesday’s murder received. In a video of the incident, the officer can be seen on the driver’s side of a car pointing a gun at the vehicle. As the car began to pull away, he shot the driver, who was pronounced dead an hour later. Police have only identified him as Nahel M., a 17-year-old Frenchman of Algerian and Moroccan descent.
A French prosecutor said on Thursday that even under the provisions of the 2017 law, the officer did not meet the legal standard to open fire. The officer was placed under formal investigation on charges of “voluntary manslaughter”.
Prominent politicians called for the law to be revised. And a editorial in Le Monde, one of France’s leading newspapers, called for legislative changes.
“How can a problem that arose in 2017 and has been confirmed by the facts every year since, only today be politically addressed?” said Marine Tondelier, the head of the French Greens, “just because a 17-year-old boy died and we have a video.”