Police: Senate and government oppose reform of identity checks

The Senate, in agreement with the government, rejected on Thursday, May 15, a socialist bill aimed at reforming the use of identity checks , notably by introducing a system of receipts issued by law enforcement, designed to combat discriminatory practices.

Unsurprisingly, in a chamber dominated by a right-centrist alliance, the bill proposed by Senator Corinne Narassiguin of Seine-Saint-Denis was overwhelmingly rejected.

This review has rekindled the sensitive debate on the links between the police and the public, with the revival of a proposal already made under François Hollande but never implemented: to systematize the issuance of a receipt after each check.

"One racial profiling check is one too many," warned the leader of the Socialist Party senators, Patrick Kanner, with Corinne Narassiguin expressing concern that these checks could sometimes become "the trigger for a damaged relationship between a section of the population and the police."

According to her, the receipt would have the advantage of better tracking these checks, which she considers discriminatory and which are very difficult to quantify - the Court of Auditors estimates them at nearly 47 million per year, of which 15 million are road checks.

Other measures proposed by the left - and rejected: enshrining in the Code of Criminal Procedure the requirement to provide reasons for these checks, and restricting the terms of certain preventive checks or systematizing the use of body cameras during checks.

In 2017, the Defender of Rights (DDD) concluded that a young man "perceived as Black or Arab" was twenty times more likely to be stopped than the rest of the population. It also published a study in 2024 in which nearly 40% of law enforcement officers surveyed considered identity checks "not very effective or not at all."

Police unions, for their part, have long voiced their opposition to the creation of a receipt, arguing that it would increase the workload of law enforcement. This argument has been echoed by the right-wing senators and the government.

"Behind this intention lies an insidious distrust of our law enforcement, a kind of generalized suspicion," insisted Les Républicains senator Stéphane Le Rudulier.

"I cannot suggest that on a regular, not to say systematic, basis, the checks carried out by our police services are necessarily biased, not to say dubious," added François-Noël Buffet, Minister to the Minister of the Interior, accused by the left of "denial."