This is not a reason, but perhaps an explanation. Thursday, at the judicial court of Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis), four police officers from the CSI 93 were tried for a series of blunders committed, in May 2019, during an identity check that they had a hard time justifying it. Two men were beaten and arrested despite having committed no offence, CCTV footage that captured the scene showed. At the hearing, Riahd B., the head of the “Alpha 2” unit, admitted this: at the time, he was under pressure from his superiors, who had set objectives to be achieved. “You have to bring about fifteen arrests a month to be quiet as a group leader,” he said at the helm. From there to think that the two civil parties were victims of the policy of figures, there is only one step.
The former Minister of the Interior Gérard Collomb had however sounded the death knell for this practice in February 2018. “But in fact, it still exists”, explains to 20 minutes Linda Kebbab, national delegate of the SGP Police-FO Unit union. Units such as the Bac (anti-crime brigades) or the BTC (territorial contact brigades) “have arrest objectives to achieve before the end of the month, set according to the particularities of their constituency. And if they don’t reach them, we tell them, ”continues the trade unionist. Consequence: “We will always prefer to arrest 20 cannabis users rather than a dealer because, for the department head, this would only represent one filled box. »
“All useful police work is abandoned”
According to Linda Kebbab, the number of arrests carried out is entered in tables, which will be used to calculate the amount of the bonus paid annually to the commissioners, called “responsibility and performance indemnity”. And the objectives requested follow the whims of successive governments. At the moment, the priority of the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, is to fight against urban rodeos and drug trafficking. In September 2020, the police hierarchy, in Meurthe-et-Moselle and Isère, had set quantified targets for the agents of fixed fines for the use of narcotics to be achieved. The Ministry of the Interior defended itself by explaining that these were only “local initiatives”. “We will value colleagues who challenge a small city dealer more than those who, for example, prevented a feminicide by intervening quickly in domestic violence. But that, we cannot measure it, ”regrets Linda Kebbab.
The policy of numbers, which therefore officially no longer exists, “directs police activity not towards what is useful for guaranteeing the safety of citizens, but towards what can bring in bonuses or the satisfaction of the minister”, also observes Olivier Cahn, professor of criminal law at the University of Cergy and researcher at the Center for Sociological Research on Law and Criminal Institutions (Cesdip). “All the useful police work, that is to say the long investigative work, is abandoned when you have performance indicators. Unless these indicators include the quality of the surveys carried out, which is never the case”, he underlines. This “induces a loss of sense of the profession”. “The fact of having to take care of the minister’s communication by doing a perfectly useless activity does not improve the meaning that can be found in his activity. »
“There is a form of loss of meaning”
At the moment, not a day goes by without an anti-rodeo operation being carried out. “It makes civil servants lose half a day, while the files accumulate on their desks. And these are slightly more serious issues,” underlines Olivier Cahn. Linda Kebbab completes: “There is a valuation of the action at the moment T, that is to say of the arrest. But what is the meaning of this interpellation? The trade unionist also points out that in order to achieve the objectives set, “the heads of service put staff, brigades, groups in competition”. “And that can push a human to fault.”