After initial reports that the Nice attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was a self-radicalized lone wolf, French prosecutors said last week that he had a group of accomplices. Like Lahouaiej Bouhlel, all had been living in France for several years, some with dual citizenship. As the threat of political violence against France continues, the government has extended its state-of-emergency policies, which grant police and intelligence services sweeping powers to search without warrant and make arrests. The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, has called on French citizens to join the army reserves. And the government has given every indication of working hard to increase its capacity to fight “made in France” terror as well as plots from abroad.
That said, some soul-searching and reevaluation are in order. As the BBC’s Peter Taylor has written, the six French intelligence agencies, much like other French departments, have difficulty sharing information with one another and receiving information from other bodies, including police. The Bataclan attack last November was surely a failure of intelligence in this respect. But France should also take a close look at its system of policing.
Lahouaiej Bouhlel, after all, was known to police. He has been called a “petty criminal,” even if, as Theodore Dalrymple noted in a smart piece for City Journal, his “petty” activities included violent assault. Meanwhile, it was police who failed to stop Lahouaiej Bouhlel on his late-night “ice cream delivery” to the tourist zone of Nice. Initial reports about the murder of the priest in Normandy on July 26 indicate that at least one of the attackers was known to police as a potential terrorist, even having to wear an ankle bracelet. Police are inevitably on the front lines both in the prevention of and response to terrorism. Still, France, I believe, suffers from poor local policing.
Unlike Britain and America, France has never had a strong tradition of urban or community policing. Walking the beat, or specific cops on patrol through specific neighborhoods, has never been practiced in France. There are municipal police, but they are subservient to the national police. Meanwhile, the Gendarmes, who fulfill a mixed police and military function, are considered part of the military.
Regarded as revolutionary when introduced in England in the early 19th century, walking a beat is still the best kind of policing, as it gives cops, and their superiors, detailed knowledge of the terrain and people. All the way back in the 1850s, Emperor Napoleon III, having spent much of his youth in England, tried introducing policing à l’anglaise in Paris and other French cities. Subsequent ministers in subsequent regimes have tried to do likewise. At other times, French governments have placed hopes in a “national guard” that would protect (or if necessary repress violence in) their own neighborhoods, while also being available for service in case of war.
These efforts usually failed. In the 19th century, there was fear that police or soldiers wouldn’t prove loyal to the government and would go over to the side of protesters. These days, many French believe that the mere presence of police in a neighborhood violates the presumption of innocence, as if policing by its nature is punitive rather than preventive. Meanwhile, French governments have often thought that the esprit de corps of the gendarmes demanded separation from civilians. Even today, French gendarmes live with their families in special compounds away from the center of town.
In one of France’s frequent though usually unsuccessful efforts at “decentralization,” the Chirac-Jospin government in 1998 introduced a police de proximité, separate from the national gendarmes, whose aim was to carry out community policing functions. Nicolas Sarkozy, the ostensibly law and order president, abolished it, famously accusing these cops of being mere “social workers” and of playing football with kids instead of repressing crime. Seeing the necessity for more cops, President François Hollande revived the institution in 2012. Yet a Paris-based security expert tells me that the force is regrettably considered a bit of a laughingstock. Communication between police de proximité and the national police remains weak. The goal of the police de proximité has been to provide a kind of broken-windows policing. Their mission is to defend public order and fight against delinquency. Yet it seems that broken-windows policing works best when it is carried out by cops with the fullest powers. The police de proximité are often unarmed and have strict rules of engagement. Their presence inspires little respect or fear, whether from lawbreakers or from the national police.
Could a well-constituted police de proximité have picked up information about Lahouaiej Bouhlel in advance of his attack? It’s hard to say. One can say with certainty however that the French police are making little progress in troubled neighborhoods of major cities where men like Lahouaiej Bouhlel inevitably live or spend time. There, France is still largely reliant on its national police force. Other countries have fought terrorism and political violence with a capable police force. Israel, for instance, has a highly centralized police force. Israel, however, is a small country that also boasts a heavily armed citizenry, which has frequently intervened with success against terrorists—including in cases not unlike the truck assault in Nice. Israel also has a volunteer police auxiliary force, whose members do walk a beat.
Whatever the “Marseillaise” says, I do not foresee any contemporary French government arming the citizenry, nor do I believe the country requires Israeli-levels of policing. Still, a concerted effort to put the best police on local streets, with full police powers, could be very much in order. As it stands now, the French police are called in when there’s a problem; they leave when it’s solved or when there isn’t one. The local knowledge that comes from the beat and that sometimes, though not always, filters up and becomes useful intelligence is less available. Properly administered, community policing could lead to greater trust (and fear) of authorities in those troubled neighborhoods which are the source in Europe of most domestic terrorism. As intelligent commentators have noted, French security services rely upon a network of informants to keep them abreast of activities in these neighborhoods. This is picking the low-hanging fruit, saving the government from the work of developing its own, real-time sense of what’s happening in its neighborhoods. Informants can sometimes be effective, but clearly they are not sufficient.
New York and other American cities saw the benefits of an increase in community policing over the last few decades. In France, community policing could help bolster intelligence-gathering and finally begin the process of making the dangerous neighborhoods less accommodating for those planning violence.
The serious bolstering of community police in France is unlikely to be welcomed by the French. Police there do not benefit from the wellspring of public support from which they still benefit in America. If serious community policing, conducted by officers with full police powers, were tried seriously, it would likely be cast an invasive assault on liberty. There could well be antipolice sentiment that would make the current wave of it in America pale by comparison. Still, it could help.
At the risk of being accused of cultural superiority, I will say that many of the best-operating features of French government were initially borrowed from Anglos or Americans; recall the old joke that heaven is English government and French food and hell the reverse. Anglo-American policing is hardly heavenly, but it’s better than the alternatives. As they grapple with a difficult security situation, the French should take a closer look at how their English-speaking friends police.
Neil Rogachevsky is the Tikvah postdoctoral fellow at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center.
