Beauvau of security: how do European countries control their police?
London police making an arrest on the sidelines of a demonstration, January 9, 2021. REUTERS - SIMON DAWSON
Text by: Romain Philips Follow
7 min
The General Inspectorate of the French National Police (IGPN) has been under fire from criticism for several months.
Its reform is one of the projects on which will floor police unions, representatives of the gendarmerie, mayors and parliamentarians during the Beauvau of security launched on Monday.
But how are the police controlled in our European neighbors?
Overview.
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Accused of partiality or of lack of transparency, the IGPN concentrates strong criticism.
Placed directly under the control of the General Directorate of the National Police, it is made up of police officers responsible for investigating other police officers.
“
Judges and parties
”, according to Sébastien Roché, research director at the CNRS and author of
De la police en Démocratie
(Grasset).
"
It is the most endogenous system that exists,
" he adds.
If criticisms are fired on this point, for the director of the IGPN, Brigitte Jullien, this is precisely what makes her strength: "
All professions have internal control and they are not called into question, lawyers , doctors, journalists
”,
she declared last June
at a press conference.
“
Peer control is the key to ethics, because we ask ourselves the question and we ask ourselves it every day
: is this policeman worthy of being with us, of staying with us?
"
►
To read also: France: how does the IGPN work?
In Europe,
several schools
exist in terms of observation and control of police institutions.
If in the south of the continent, especially in Italy, Spain and Portugal, the system is similar to that of
France
, in the north, major reforms have been carried out to separate the police from those who control it.
Fight against hierarchical links
In the United Kingdom, for example, which is a good student in this area, the control of the
police
is organized by an independent institution: the IOPC (
Independent Office for Police Conduct
).
This public body is made up entirely of non-police officers.
The director general - appointed by the Minister of the Interior -, the executive council or the regional directors all come from civil society and have never held a position within the police.
Thus, the control of the police forces is here totally externalized and the police have the obligation to forward to the IOPC all the most serious cases, from the moment when a person has been injured or killed after having been in contact with an agent, even if no complaint has been filed.
It is then up to the institution to decide on the investigation to be carried out: either by its own investigators in sensitive cases, or by the police services under the supervision of the IOPC.
In Belgium, it is
Committee P,
attached to Parliament "
and not to the director general of the police, as in France
", notes Sébastien Roché, which is responsible for observing and controlling police institutions.
Headed by a magistrate, the investigators are made up of police officers who no longer have any connection with their institution (former police officers or retirees) as well as people from civil society.
"
They are the investigators of the P Committee. They cannot be influenced by promotions or transfers, they are not police investigators, and that is what makes the difference
", notes the specialist.
A situation quite similar to the IPCA
(Independence Police Complaints Authority
) with the only difference that the Danish service is attached to the Ministry of Justice.
In several countries such as Finland, Sweden and Ireland, police control is carried out by the “
Ombuds
” (protector, in Swedish).
Institutions comparable to the French Defender of Rights in terms of organization but whose powers go beyond that of making simple recommendations.
The Swedish Ombudsman, for example, created in 1809 making him the oldest in Europe, has the exceptional prerogative to initiate "
legal proceedings against an agent who, in defiance of his function or his mission, has committed a crime. criminal offense other than a violation of press freedom or the right to freedom of expression
”.
"
The goal is always the search for impartiality
"
It is therefore by severing all hierarchical links between supervisory authorities and public officials that these countries have developed their system.
“
The goal is always the search for impartiality.
To ensure that the person who will decide, investigate, is not part
”in the case, summarizes Sébastian Roché.
A reflection carried out since the 1920s in countries like Finland and for almost 60 years for the United Kingdom.
And this is where "
the French situation is not enviable because the reflection on independence has still not started
".
The question of the reform of the IGPN is however on the program of the
four months of consultations initiated by the Ministry of the Interior.
For its part, Germany is one of the only European countries not to have a national police control institution.
Across the Rhine, the daily police are highly regionalized and are therefore in direct contact with local elected officials.
But the country has, in general, legislation "
more conducive to the defense of citizens
", comments Mr. Roché.
In addition, the Constitutional Court supervises the action of the police very strictly.
Recently, it banned the use of tear gas against anti-nuclear protesters.
Several degrees of transparency
Another point on which certain European neighbors of France stand out: that of transparency.
In France, the inspection services of the police only very rarely communicate on current cases.
The last time was during the ultra-sensitive investigation into
the death of Steve Maia Caniço
after a police intervention on the evening of the Music Festival in Nantes.
Usually, they do not communicate on the purpose of a complaint or on their results, except when
submitting their annual report
.
"
Today, we do not know which reports are processed or not and no data analysis is done by the IGPN, the system is completely opaque
", regrets Sébastien Roché.
Conversely, across the Channel, the IOPC
makes available to the public the number of complaints received
and their purpose, or the number of deaths occurring during police interventions, a figure that was published for the first time in France in 2017. It also provides a summary of each survey.
In the Nordic countries, like Finland, all the data is simply published online and accessible to everyone.
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