Contrôles au faciès in France: From Denial to Recognition to Inaction

In France, police stops have been a source of tension between the police and marginalized groups for decades, but they did not become a salient political issue until the late 2000s. The main driver behind the politicization of police stops was a campaign against contrôles au faciès (discriminatory stops) led by transnational and national organizations. The campaign used three intertwined strategies: first, they collaborated with scholars to produce knowledge quantifying disparities in police stops, which made it more difficult for the government to deny the existence of discriminatory stops; then, they launched a political advocacy campaign during the 2012 presidential election, which succeeded in imposing the issue on the political agenda; third, they initiated innovative litigation, based on civil law, which led France’s highest court to condemn the state for discriminatory stops. This three-tiered strategy helped place the issue on the political agenda. However, under pressure from police unions, successive Interior Ministers rejected activists’ reform proposals, arguing that they were ineffective and represented a sign of defiance toward the police. By the end of the 2010s, contrôles au faciès had become a recurrent issue of political debates, but little about the policy or practice of police stops had changed.