Fundamental Change

Telling in this regard is the fact that the government sought initially to extend AFD to all crimes otherwise punishable by an under-one-year prison sentence. The government backpedaled from this maximalist position, but critics of the AFD nonetheless argue that the reform dangerously blurs the boundaries between executive and judicial power.

“[The AFD] marks a fundamental change in the role of the police in France,” Bisiou told Jacobin:

Traditionally, the police will investigate and try to find evidence of a crime. They accept a debate about the evidence, which the offender can challenge before a judge. Now, the police declare that there has been an infraction, and then they punish it.

The process of contesting an AFD is likewise arduous. In order to challenge it, one needs to deposit the actual amount of the fine, a payment that will only be reimbursed upon winning the appeal. Given that many low-income individuals accumulate arrears out of inability to pay the initial fine, this acts as a fundamental barrier to appealing an AFD. Furthermore, one must present evidence contradicting the official report produced by the ticketing officer — pitting the defendant’s word against the policeman’s.

According to Mediapart, the interior ministry bill contains a few concessions to critics of AFDs. Police officers are now required to inform individuals of their right to appeal. Likewise, the requirement to provide the fee of the AFD before contesting it is waived for certain infractions.

“It’s not just a form of police violence, it is a real attack on a cornerstone of democracy in this country,” says Omer Mas Capitolin, a community organizer and activist in Paris. “Before being judged, one is presumed to be innocent. But here the presumption of innocence is shattered for a whole segment of the population.”

“As it currently stands, just about everyone considers that the procedure for contesting a minor-offense fine is not a reality in practice,” says Bisiou.

But with French politics trapped in a tough-on-crime spiral, considerations like this are falling on deaf ears. Having peddled the idea that France is being “ensavaged” by petty criminals, Darmanin claims that the government will only reverse the far right’s advance by “speaking to the gut” of French people, as he remarked in a polemical interview with Le Monde last summer.

In fact, the government’s new gift to the interior ministry has the Macronists on the same side as the far right. The budgeting bill has thus far sailed through Parliament and is approaching a final vote after reconciliation between its Senate and lower-house versions.

In the first vote in the National Assembly, the bill passed with 419 votes as Macron’s parliamentary bloc won the backing of the combined right-wing oppositions including the center-right Républicains and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. It has been one of the rare moments of unity and consensus in a divided Parliament.

Experiments

The AFD specifically targets an intermediate class of infractions in French law. But cases of abuse in the application of fines for a lower category of offenses, known as “contraventions,” suggests that the AFD is part of what some are now calling the industrial-scale use of fines by the French police, one that is aggravating discrimination through arbitrary application of the law.

Between March 2020 and spring 2021, France lived according to the rhythm of the COVID-19 crisis and the various lockdowns and curfews introduced to prevent the spread of the virus. The French state’s strategy entailed a significant mobilization of the police, tasked with enforcing the population’s respect for the new public health rules such as curfews and wearing masks in required places. As a deterrent, a sanitary-crisis “contravention” was put in place, penalizing offenders with fines, gradated for repeat violators.

With the dust starting to clear from that period, several associations and NGOs are contesting the police’s arbitrary use of fines and ID checks — practices that have fueled accusations of racial discrimination.

The Defender of Rights (DDD), an independent public watchdog organization charged with monitoring the respect of human rights, has received a series of referrals over the French state’s enforcement of COVID-related rules and the use of fines for other lower-level noncriminal contraventions.

A collective of residents of Épinay-sous-Sénart alerted the DDD in April 2021 over the “abusive and discriminatory” nature of COVID fines handed out in their community. In March 2022, the League of Human Rights (LDH) likewise filed its own referral to the DDD, over abusive practices in residential neighborhoods in eastern Paris. Later this spring, the LDH, in concert with other organizations, called for a general amnesty on COVID-related fines — some individuals having accumulated several thousand euros’ worth of fines and late fees. The request has thus far been ignored by the government.

These referrals paint the picture of fines being handed out in bursts, often targeting individuals for multiple cases of the same offense on the same day. In situations where police officers know individuals in the community, defendants claim that they weren’t even notified of the contravention until receiving notification of the fine by mail and sometimes without even encountering the ticketing officer.

The Mothers’ Brigade, a collective based in the eastern Paris neighborhood of Belleville, launched the latest referral to the DDD in October 2022. Documents reviewed by Jacobin reveal the often-ludicrous targeting of some young men, more specifically young men of color.

On September 20, 2020, one twenty-one-year-old man (the collective’s legal team requested anonymity for their clients) received two fines for the sum of €375 each. Both fines were for not wearing a mask in public and were for offenses purportedly committed four minutes apart. The individual owes over €6,500 to the French treasury, including fines stretching back to 2017 for minor violations such as daytime or nighttime “disturbances” or breaking traffic rules.

Another individual — also from Paris’s 20th arrondissement, a gentrifying yet historically working-class and multicultural corner of the city — has accumulated over €13,000 in unpaid fines since 2019. He received six different contravention penalties amounting to €2,055 euros on February 4, 2021 — at a time when the French government’s COVID-related rules had become the subject of indifference or even outright derision for much of the population.

“COVID-19 brought the abusive use of tickets to light, but the state has experimented with [industrial-scale use of] fines in working-class neighborhoods for quite some time,” says Mas Capitolin, whose association, the Maison Communautaire Pour un Développement Solidaire, has helped the Mothers’ Brigade organize since 2019.

The use of fines highlights the two-track nature of France’s policing system, with some communities bearing the fuller brunt of law enforcement than others. Some suggest that it is particularly employed on the front lines of gentrification, as an under-the-radar tactic for keeping certain individuals at the margins of public space.

“Some people are more targeted than others, and it’s precisely those people who are usually affected,” says Nathalie Tehio, a lawyer and member of the League of Human Rights, which filed a referral to the DDD in March 2022. “It’s not a coincidence if there’s racial and social targeting.”

“The problem of fines is especially pronounced in Paris,” Tehio told Jacobin:

It happens in pockets. For example, the 10th arrondissement is an area in the process of gentrification. You have a lot of wealthier people coming in, and that means that people from lower social classes are progressively leaving. But it’s still mixed. You can have a whole area that is very well off, and right next to it you have housing estates. In those pockets there, that’s where the fines are going to be.

Certain applications of the AFD specifically reinforce this form of policing as well. In September 2021, the extension of the AFD for the offense of loitering in and occupying the ground floor or stairwell of an apartment complex went into effect. For Tehio, the goal of extending the AFD to offenses like these is to “get these young men out of public space.”

Political Ends

The DDD declined to discuss when contacted by Jacobin, specifying that the investigations regarding the referrals it has received were still underway. But in its public opinion released in early October in response to the current interior ministry bill, Claire Hédon, the Defender of Rights, cautioned the government against expanding the AFD.

“One of the logics underlying this text is to remove the constraints of criminal procedure for more efficiency in the action of the police and gendarmes,” writes the DDD. “This tendency increases the powers of the police and gendarmes, and sometimes the risks of arbitrary power, discrimination, and deterioration of relations between the police and the population.”

Noting that in some cases fines were handed out “at distance, i.e., without a direct exchange between the ticketing officer and the person receiving the fine,” the DDD likewise underscored the often-discriminatory nature of the application of police fines, whether for low-level contraventions or minor offenses:

The Defender of Rights notes that in the situations referred, these repeated fines almost exclusively concern young men (under twenty-five years of age), sometimes minors, perceived to be of foreign origin, who are fined within a limited geographical area around their home, often by the same officers.

The DDD’s warnings join a growing chorus of actors calling out the government’s move to expand the use of minor-offense fines. In France, the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights called in October for Parliament to “reject” the government’s proposed reform, saying that “generalizing” the AFD “would weaken the fundamental guarantees of those subject to trial and social cohesion, without improving penal responses.”

The AFD is even raising eyebrows internationally. In a report on discrimination in the French police released on December 2, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called out

the frequent use of identity checks, discriminatory stops, and the application of minor-offense fines [AFDs] imposed by police or law enforcement, disproportionately targeting members of certain minority groups, in particular Africans, people of African descent, people of Arab origin, Roma, travelers and non-citizens.

Many likewise fear that the extension of the AFD could be used for political ends — giving police officers a means to apply rapid-fire penalization of activists and social movements. As part of the new bill’s expansion of the AFD to minor offenses, the AFD will now target infractions such as intrusion in an educational establishment and the “blocking of circulation” of vehicles.

“These are offenses that are traditionally blamed on activists and trade unionists in the context of a political action,” says Bisiou. “And here the activists are going to be penalized by the state without them being able to really contest it.”

An AFD can still only be issued against someone of adult legal age. But a high-school senior who happens to be eighteen could be dealt a criminal record during a school occupation by a ticketing police officer, with little recourse to appeal.

If the AFD was originally meant to target petty offenses committed on a mass scale that were clogging up the justice system, Bisiou notes that many of the new infractions count only in the hundreds of cases per year. But with a streamlined process, it could be much easier for police forces to penalize protestors occupying roads and intersections, public transit workers occupying portions of their worksite, or students leading protests in their high school.

“The penalization of civil disobedience and union actions is a long-running trend,” says Bisiou. “Quite simply, it’s taking on greater and greater proportions.”