French police use broad powers to stop and search Black and Arab youth even when there is no sign or evidence of wrongdoing. These “identity checks,” as they are known in France, often involve invasive searches of bags and cell phones as well as humiliating body pat-downs, even of children as young as 10. In poor neighborhoods, where people of immigrant origins represent a significant part of the population, Human Rights Watch takes the view that police use identity checks as a blunt instrument to exert authority.
There is little evidence to demonstrate that identity checks are effective in identifying and preventing potential criminal behavior. The French state does not collect the kind of data necessary for any kind of assessment, including reliable data on the number and outcome of identity checks. The testimonies gathered in this research provide ample evidence, however, that identity checks drive a deep and sharp wedge between police and communities.
Accounts of police stops, video footage, and official data, suggest that police stops related to enforcement of lockdown measures beginning in mid-March 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic showed a bias towards stops targeting minorities in poor neighborhoods. Within the first 10 days of lockdown, videos began circulating on social and other media of police stops that appear to be abusive, violent, and discriminatory. By late April, government statistics showed that police had conducted over double the national average of stops in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest area of metropolitan France, and that 17 percent of those stopped were fined, a rate almost three times the national average.
Abusive and discriminatory identity checks are a longstanding problem in France. Pent-up anger over police abuses, including heavy-handed identity checks, played a role in riots in 2005 in cities across France and appears to underlie countless lower-intensity conflicts between police and young people in urban areas and the poor suburbs—often referred to in French as the banlieues. Statistical evidence gathered by social scientists and nongovernmental organizations indicates that Black and Arab men and boys, or people perceived as such, living in economically disadvantaged areas are particularly frequent targets for such stops, suggesting that police engage in ethnic profiling (that is, making assumptions about who is more likely to be a delinquent based on appearance, including race and ethnicity, rather than behavior) to determine whom to stop.
In 2012, Human Rights Watch published The Root of Humiliation: Abusive Identity Checks in France. This report, based on research in Paris and its suburbs, Lille, Strasbourg, and Grenoble in 2019 and 2020, takes stock of the progress as well as the stagnation with respect to reforming abusive police identity check practices in France. In France, these clashes are still going on.