In France, leaving your car registration at home can get you locked up

French citizens are detained for even the most minor of infractions. Last year, French police detained 830,000 people.

Verleine Pinot doesn’t drive her convertible any more. It attracts too much unwanted attention from the police. Driving it was an open invitation to being pulled over, the 54-year old said. Sometimes cops would drive past with their windows down and yell “hey, blondies!” at Pinot and her 19-year-old daughter. Another time, they arrested her.

After ending up in a holding cell almost a year ago, she now gets around in her banged-up Nissan Micra. The memory of the night of March 31, 2009 still haunts Pinot, who used to be a dean at a high school. She spent half that night in a holding cell and the other half guarded by two police officers in a hospital. All because she objected to a traffic ticket.

“I begged them on my knees to let me go to the bathroom,” she recalled in a recent interview in her home in Le Pecq, a commune just west of Paris. “Or at least let me get undressed so I could pee on the floor. Making a women soil her clothes is paramount to torture.”

250,000 extra arrests

The French police has been embroiled in controversy since it was revealed it had taken 830,000 people into temporary custody last year, 250,000 more than the official figure cited by the police. Home affairs minister Brice Hortefeux was quoted as saying the true number “knocked him out of his chair” with surprise.

The official figure of 580,000 arrests was already twice as high as the number at the beginning of this century. Hortefeux was forced to acknowledge the official number had not included people locked up after traffic violations, such as Verleine Pinot.

French media have recently reported numerous incidents involving police misconduct. A 14-year-old girl was arrested lying in her bed on a Saturday morning and detained until nightfall in nothing but her pyjamas. She was allegedly involved in a high school scuffle – which she denied. Three young students were apprehended in a suburb when they tried to ride the bus using a public transport pass only valid on schooldays. It was a holiday. French police also arrested three moviegoers who had brought a can of coke bought off-premises to a movie theatre were bringing one’s own drinks was expressly forbidden.

The resulting uproar has reached the halls of the French National Assembly. “We must take action before the European Court of Human Rights rules against us,” said Manuel Aeschlimann, a French member of parliament for the UMP, the party of president Nicolas Sarkozy. The UMP is looking to establish new police regulations. “This is not about how the police do their job,” said Jean-François Copé, who leads the UMP in parliament. “The magnitude of things is a political matter.”

Impossible to discipline police

The most delicate issue is that lawyers are not always allowed to be present during police interrogations. The European Court of Human Rights has already condemned France for the practice, but it has fallen short of a conviction, though it has imposed one on Turkey for the same practice.

An additional problem, according to Amnesty International, it that it is “almost impossible” to take disciplinary action against French police officers who abuse their powers.

A government instituted independent commission that hears complaints against the police regularly finds officers acted disproportionately or humiliated citizens. But sanctions are rarely imposed. In Verleine Pinot’s case, the independent commission also found the police had used excessive force and frisked her without reason.

Pinot’s ‘crime’ was forgetting to bring along her driver’s licence and car registration papers when she left the house. The routine traffic stop took place only 200 metres from her home. When Pinot asked if her daughter could go and fetch her papers, she said, the police officer response was irked.

After letting Pinot wait for half an hour, the officer finally returned with three tickets: one for being unable to produce a valid licence, another for the absence of car registration papers and a third for failing to reduce speed near a pedestrian crossing. Pinot said the last claim was pure fabrication on the part of the officer. “Then I got a little riled,” she said.

Pinot said she threatened to file a complaint with the police commissioner and the officer then twisted her arm and forced her against his car. Pinot claims she still can’t bend her arm properly, even after 40 sessions with a physical therapist.

Nightmares and strip searches

But more than anything, she feels hurt psychologically. She said she still suffers because she was strip searched at the police station and was told she would be able to go home soon, but was instead detained, with handcuffs around her sprained wrists, when she refused to sign papers admitting to infractions she denied. “I have nightmares,” Pinot said. “I have told my husband: ‘I want move. Let’s leave the country’.”

Justice minister Michèle Alliot-Marie has proposed that arrested citizens should be granted a choice: minor violations can be handled by a quick interrogation without a lawyer present lasting no longer than four hours, or they can opt to be properly detained and be granted the right to legal counsel.

The police has defended its actions claiming current laws require them to detain people for even the slightest of infractions. “It’s not that we like arresting people,” said Jean-Marc Bailleul, a member of the board of a French police union. “We are under political pressure.”

But there is more at work here. The French and their police officers have maintained “less than peaceful” relations for two centuries, said Fabien Jobard, a sociologist with the criminological research institute Cesdip. Since the Napoleonic era, the French police’s main aim is protecting the state rather than its citizens, contrary to the principle of law enforcement in the United Kingdom and other Northern European countries. “This is why you should never protest against French police officers. They assume you are a potential threat, that you are dangerous,” Jobard said.