Parisian Police Officers

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Many people who do not live in Paris still have a rather outdated conception of Parisian police officers: They imagine them as old men with moustaches wearing képis (little cylindrical hats), or something equally colorful but archaic. This photograph shows modern Parisian police officers as they actually appear today.

This group of police officers is waiting to escort a huge group of roller skaters (perhaps 10,000 or so) who skate around the city in a sort of rally at prearranged dates and times (usually on Sunday afternoons). The recent trend in the police force is to adopt whatever type of attire and transportation best suits the duty, and so these agents de police are attired for an afternoon of skating. I’m not sure if the skates and other gear are provided for them or if they invest in their own stuff; most of them are wearing similar but not identical gear. Obviously they can only select officers who know how to skate for this type of duty!

I photographed this on the place Saint-Michel, in the Latin Quarter. The skaters themselves (thousands of them) are off to the left and not visible here; they were waiting for the rally to start. (They are escorted down streets with traffic control to reduce the risk of accidents.)

With the advent of the new-but-old policy of police officers on neighborhood beats (police urbaine de proximité, or PUP), quite a bit of diversity has developed in their transportation. Police cars are still used, of course, but it is hard to get cars around the city, and obviously they cannot patrol sidewalks or other areas not open to automobiles in a car. And so the police sometimes move about on bicycles (not shown here—I hope to get a photo of that someday), or roller skates, or small motor scooters, or even on hand scooters (or so I’ve heard—I have not yet seen that in person!).

These police officers are wearing skating helmets, but the standard hat for a police officer is pretty much the same as it is in the United States; the days of the can-shaped képi ended in 1986. They look pretty much like police officers anywhere else in the world today. (Note that some other law-enforcement and military agents, such as the gendarmerie and the regular army, still wear the képi.)

The garden-variety police officer in France is called a gardien de la paix (peace officer), very much as in the U.S. Unlike the U.S., however, police forces throughout France are ultimately under national control; cities cannot form their own police departments completely independently of the national Ministry of the Interior. This means that the quality and training of the police in France are much more consistent from one place to another; you don’t run the risk of seeing the mayor’s family members or a local biker gang working as police officers here.

One last note: France is the only country I’ve been to in which the female police officers are actually cute (as opposed to looking just like the male officers, which seems to be the usual case elsewhere). You can see one of them in the foreground of this photo, although I don’t know if she was typically cute because I didn’t see her face.

Photographed on August 20, 2001.