To illustrate the phenomenon, the police unions have worked on the formula: “A refusal to comply every twenty minutes”.
Hammered at will by the organizations, the sentence is also regularly taken up by the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin.
In 2021, around 27,700 refusals to comply were recorded by the police and gendarmes, an increase of almost 50% in ten years, according to official figures.
Nearly 5,247 refusals to comply "with risk of death or injury" have been recorded, according to the latest figures from Road Safety.
An increase of 88% for ten years, with a clear acceleration since 2018 (+64%).
A continuous increase in refusals to comply
At the same time, police shootings at moving vehicles have increased, which police unions attribute to rising refusals to comply.
But for Fabien Jobard, director of research at the CNRS and specialist in police issues, there is a "complete decorrelation" between the two phenomena.
The "continuous and regular increase for twenty years" in refusals to comply cannot explain the "extremely brutal" increase in the number of police shootings at moving vehicles, which rose from 137 to 202 in 2017.
That year, on February 28, Parliament passed a law modifying the rules for the use of their service weapon by the police, under pressure from the unions after the attack with Molotov cocktails in which four officers were victims in Viry-Châtillon (Essonne) four months earlier.
A law on police shootings that changes everything
Before, the police officer was subject like any citizen to the regime of self-defense defined by the Penal Code: he could only respond “simultaneously and proportionately” to a “current and real” attack against him or others.
Since then, article 435-1 paragraph 4 of the internal security code allows him to shoot the occupants of a vehicle "likely to perpetrate, in their flight, attacks on their life or their physical integrity or those of 'other'.
After the peak recorded in 2017, the annual average of shots on fleeing vehicles has fallen back to stabilize around 156 shots, but remains significantly higher than that of the period before the law (around 119 shots).
Above all, these shots are more and more often fatal.
In 2022, five police officers were indicted in connection with 13 cases of fatal shootings at a fleeing car.
The others have been released without prosecution at this stage.
Miscellaneous facts
Perpignan: A shotgun discovered in the vehicle of a man who was fleeing the police
Miscellaneous facts
Loiret: He refuses to comply, flees... but forgets his identity card on the spot
Miscellaneous facts
Police