Can the police change their ethics?

For more than a year, "yellow vest" protests and social movements have followed one another in France, giving rise to recurring clashes between demonstrators and forces of law and order.

Stéphane Lemercier, University of Montpellier

The demonstration on Thursday January 9 has also given rise to new videos questioning the way in which police officers, a priori overwhelmed, use violence and forms of "illegalism" that today call into question their profession.

How can we stop this escalation of violence? How can we return to a virtuous police force at the service of citizens? One might be tempted to answer that police officers need to be inculcated with a code of ethics and better controlled. But they already know perfectly well that they must respect the laws of the Republic and the code of ethics. They also know that they are often filmed on public thoroughfares, but that doesn't stop them from indulging in violent behavior, as the numerous videos and tweets following the latest demonstrations remind us.

Police illogic

Illegalisms have been defined by Michel Foucault as the set of illicit practices each associated with distinct social groups.

He specified that illegalism contains the possibility of respecting legality according to circumstances. This may seem paradoxical, but specialists know this:

"Clearly, and as the classics of police sociology show, an attitude of strict compliance with the rules would inevitably lead to paralysis of the entire organization."

Magistrates themselves are complicit in this state of affairs, as criminal procedure has become so complex that it is difficult to complete a police investigation in full compliance with the law without risking a procedural error. Jean-Paul Brodeur, an eminent police specialist, even asserted that

"the ever-open possibility of transgressing with impunity the laws to which other citizens are subject is constitutive of the idea of policing."

Mimicry and anomie

Mimicry, for example, plays an important role in police illegality. This is the behavior adopted by police officers to carry out their missions: driving at high speed to catch a fleeing driver, using force to subdue a violent individual, or using a weapon to neutralize a terrorist.

This may be recognized as legal and legitimate in certain circumstances, but it contributes to the disinhibition of police officers on a daily basis.

Anomie also plays a role. Here, it is understood as the absence of clear rules. This concept may seem contradictory, but since illegalisms are tolerances granted on an ad hoc basis, we can speak of police anomie when certain rules are no longer clearly established.

Identity checks, for example, are highly regulated by law, but police officers in the field largely disregard them. And when they have operated "outside the framework", if they discover an offence, they find a valid reason for checking after the event to justify their initial action.

Finally, habitus are the dispositions internalized during socialization in an environment, and act as a matrix for perception and appreciation of the environment. Thus, from the very first days on the job, the elders encourage the young to forget what they learned at the police academy, and initiate them into what to do according to their own criteria...

In the field, young police officers tend to want to explain the reasons for their stop or intervention to people, but their elders dissuade them from doing so, because "people don't need to know" and/or "can't understand", and "we don't have to justify ourselves".

In Ladj Ly's film Les Misérables, the policeman "Pento" embodies this figure of the upright officer who tries to follow the rules.

A step towards deontics

There is sometimes a fine line between tolerated illegality and illegal behavior on the part of some police officers. This leads us to believe that reinforcing the deontological ethics of police officers does not seem relevant, since it would mean reinforcing legal texts which are already not always respected. We therefore suggest that it might be more relevant to train officers in deontics, which is fundamentally different from deontology.

Deontics is the science that studies the formal relationships that exist between normative concepts such as obligations, permissions and prohibitions. We even speak of a deontic logic which, to be efficient, articulates time, agent, right and addressees, based on the application of enlightened discernment (which is of interest to us, as we'll find traces of it later in the code of ethics).

Faced with an emergency situation, the police officer must intervene quickly, while reconciling respect for the law, his rights and his duties. He rarely considers the possible consequences of his action, but only thinks about what he can do in the time available.

Secondly, by drawing on virtue ethics, we could encourage police officers to question the implementation of personal behaviors in which they would no longer simply ask themselves "How to do in order to do well?" but rather "How to be in order to do well?". For, according to John Stuart Mill, "it is the consequences for others that enable us to evaluate our actions morally"), and even if most police officers claim to demonstrate good will and act conscientiously, André Comte-Sponville points out that :

"Good will is no guarantee, nor is a clear conscience an excuse: for morality is not enough for virtue, it also requires intelligence and lucidity."

Reflective practices

And this is precisely one of the new features that appears in the latest code of ethics for the police and gendarmerie (2014):

"Police officers and gendarmes, in the performance of their duties, show discernment: they take into account in all circumstances the nature of the risks and threats of each situation with which they are confronted, and the time they have to act, in order to choose the best response."

We're no longer talking about laws to be obeyed at all costs, we're talking about personal ethical reflection. But for this to happen, police training needs to be reviewed, because it's no longer a question of imposing rigorist notions of rights, but of getting officers to think about the consequences of their actions by implementing reflexive practices.

At present, operational debriefings are held after operations or demonstrations, but these take place in groups, and officers are not encouraged to reflect individually on their practices, express their feelings and/or consider the consequences of their actions. Introducing more in-depth reflective practices would help to change attitudes and operating methods.

Indeed, it must be understood that the end cannot justify the means, and that force must remain within the law only if it is absolutely necessary and legitimate.

The essential challenge for everyday security is to return to virtuous personal behavior on the part of police officers, based on a consequentialist ethic, i.e., a moral analysis founded on the consequences of individual or collective actions, for a police force at the service of citizens, respected because it is respectable and not because it is feared.


The author recently published "Précis d'éthique et de déontologie dans la police", les Editions du Prévôt, 455 pages, 2019.The Conversation

Stéphane Lemercier, Lecturer - Member of the Montpellier Criminal Law Team (EDPM), University of Montpellier

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.