French police under spotlight over Liverpool fans’ treatment

Television images of Liverpool fans being casually teargassed and pepper-sprayed at the Stade de France before Saturday’s chaotic Champions League final have – not for the first time – trained a spotlight on France’s policing methods.

Organisations from Amnesty International to the UN’s high commissioner for human rights have criticised France’s crowd control tactics, with Human Rights Watch detailing the extensive physical injuries caused by weapons from truncheons to teargas grenades, rubber bullets and larger “flash-ball” rubber pellets on peaceful citizens in recent years.

A video of four white officers brutally beating an unarmed black music producer in his Paris studio in November 2020 was the latest in a string of violent incidents to cause widespread outrage, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to act.

Announcing a series of reforms last year aimed at improving relations between the police and public as well as improving officers’ working conditions, Macron said French police must be “above reproach” and “when there are mistakes, they must be punished”.

Long a taboo subject, French policing – viewed by its many critics as instinctively repressive and favouring disproportionate force – has become a major political issue, especially since the gilets jaunes protests of 2018 and 2019, in which an estimated 2,500 protesters were injured, with several losing eyes or a limb.

At least 1,800 police and gendarmes were injured in the same protests, according to interior ministry figures, however, and French police argue they are the target of growing violence, some of it extreme and deliberately aimed at maiming or even killing.

Experts say part of the present problem is an intake of hastily recruited, poorly trained