Fines, Evictions and ID Checks: How Police Target the ‘Undesirables’. An interview with Magda Boutros and Aline Daillère

In April, the French Défenseur des Droits published a study on how the police treat people they deem “undesirable”. Young men, sometimes minors, are harassed through repeated identity checks and fined multiple times a day, with penalties that, accumulated over the years, can reach several tens of thousands of euros. A widespread phenomenon that amounts to a policy, against which legal recourse is virtually nonexistent, according to the authors of the study, Magda Boutros and Aline Daillère, sociologists at the Center for Research on Social Inequalities at Sciences Po Paris. Interview.

Index : The study you recently published, “Amendes, évictions, contrôles : une étude sur la gestion des ‘indésirables’ par la police”, is the fruit of a four-handed effort based on two separate surveys you carried out. What are the results of this research and why did you decide to combine them in a single publication?

Magda Boutros: For my sociology thesis, I worked on mobilizations against police violence and discrimination in France. Among other things, I studied the mobilization in Paris’s 12th arrondissement, which led to a trial against a police unit that called itself the “Tiger Brigade.” I had access to the criminal investigation file from that case, which stemmed from a complaint filed by 18 people—17 young men and one young woman—against the officers in that unit. With this file in hand, I realized that within the police—at least in the 12th arrondissement—there were written, daily, top-down instructions to “remove” so-called “undesirables” from the public space. These are the actual terms used by both the officers and their superiors.

So, I decided to analyze this judicial source in order to understand what an eviction entails, how it happens, who the “undesirables” are, and what these practices look like. The judicial file includes a whole set of internal documents from the precinct covering the three years investigated—2013 to 2015: daily instructions from superiors to neighborhood patrols, annual reports from the precinct, and “mains courantes” (police intervention logs) written after officers conducted interventions.

These intervention logs are particularly revealing. There are 284 such reports in which officers summarize their actions and detail the profiles of the individuals they stopped. In many of these reports, officers list “Disturbers – Undesirables” as the reason for the intervention—a category included in the French police’s digital reporting software. This allowed us to compare what an intervention for “undesirables” involves, and how it differs from responses to other types of public disturbances.

The file also includes written correspondence between the police station, the municipality, and local residents. This gave us a view of the external pressures or complaints sent to police about groups of young people gathering in public space—and how police responded to such complaints.

Finally, one of the most interesting aspects of this file is the testimony collected by the IGPN (the French police oversight body). The IGPN conducted an exceptionally thorough investigation—something quite rare in cases involving police violence. Investigators interviewed 76 officers from the precinct, including every officer in the unit, all supervisors, and nearly every officer working in the streets. So we have their perceptions and narratives—not just about the specific incidents under investigation, but also about what kind of people they deem being “undesirable,” what an eviction means, how it’s justified, and how it’s carried out. The IGPN also interviewed 45 residents and local workers. So we have a full range of voices describing the situation from different perspectives.

Aline Daillère: On my side, I started an independent investigation in 2018–2019 into the phenomenon of multi-verbalisation—that is, people receiving repeated fines. In several working-class neighborhoods, young people were complaining about getting fined constantly and denounced abusive policing practices. I had just started my PhD at the time and decided to make it the focus of my research. That led me to investigate the experiences of multi-verbalised youth—young people who were receiving fines very frequently. I conducted fieldwork in several Parisian neighborhoods and across the Île-de-France region, although we know this issue also exists in other parts of France.

What brought our two investigations together, Magda’s and mine, was the fact that one of my research sites was the 12th arrondissement—the same area involved in the legal case Magda had studied. We discovered that some of the young people labeled as “undesirables” in Magda’s investigation—and who were therefore stopped and evicted between 2013 and 2015—were later subjected to repeated fines from that point on.

There is a clear continuity—at least in that neighborhood—between practices of control and eviction, and those related to multi-verbalisation. It made sense for us to combine our two lines of inquiry and study these police stops and repeated fines as forms of eviction targeting populations labeled as “undesirable.”

Index : In your study, you highlight the fact that spot checks and fines are a particular kind of policing, with a very wide scope of application, and subject to very little or no judicial control. What makes these policing practices particularly interesting from a research perspective?

MB: What we call a contrôle d’identité [an id check, ed.] in France exists in most countries. It’s the idea that the police have the right to stop someone, to detain them in the street, to search them to see if they’re carrying anything illegal, and so on. In France, the history of identity checks is deeply tied to the history of controlling population movement and immigration.

The earliest forms of identity checks emerged to monitor populations considered potentially dangerous or undesirable, with the aim of regulating their presence in public spaces. Gradually, this practice became more widespread with the introduction of the national ID card. In France, this generalization allowed the police to verify a person’s identity—and in doing so, to check whether they had the right to be where they were.

Although identity checks have been presented as a crime-fighting tool—because, of course, when you stop someone, you may detect some form of illegality—in reality, they are authorized for reasons that go far beyond criminal justice. An officer can conduct a check if there is suspicion that the person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit an offense. But they can also stop someone simply to prevent a potential disturbance to public order, regardless of their behavior. Checks can also be carried out under a prosecutor’s order (a réquisition) that authorizes officers to stop anyone in a particular place at a particular time. There are also border checks and administrative checks… It’s really a tool for monitoring people’s presence and mobility, and it has always been understood that way.

AD: When it comes to fines, what’s striking is that the police officers who issue them have extremely broad and discretionary power. Fines are used to punish infractions, and because many of these are everyday offenses committed in public spaces—punishable with fixed fines—a police officer can issue a fine in a wide range of situations. This gives them enormous authority.

Originally, this power belonged to judges, before the amendes forfaitaires [fixed fines, ed.] were introduced in the early 20th century. Before that, even minor infractions were handled by a judge. To avoid overloading the courts, lawmakers created the fixed fine system, which allows a police officer or gendarme to immediately sanction an offense without going through a court process. That means many of the procedural safeguards associated with judicial proceedings are absent. There’s no right to adversarial debate, no public hearing… Most of the guarantees typically associated with justice are simply bypassed.

So, the fine has become a way of giving police a judging power that is normally reserved for magistrates. Another important point about fixed fines is that there’s very little judicial oversight of how they’re applied. This is one of the findings of our investigation: it’s extremely difficult to challenge a fine, even when it’s clearly abusive or unfounded. And once you do challenge it, it’s even harder to actually get your case heard by a judge. This is because, in court, when it comes to minor offenses, a police officer’s word carries legal weight. The person fined is presumed guilty—whereas in criminal law, the presumption of innocence is supposed to be the standard.

Index : On reading the report, we are struck by the extremely serious consequences that the use of these tools can have. Some of the figures you publish are staggering: young people aged 16 with debts to the tax authorities amounting to several tens of thousands of euros. The dynamics that lead to this accumulation of debts are also striking: sometimes the same person is punished with a “bundle” of fines, which then accumulate. What do these practices reveal about the fine as a policing tool, and about its workings as an administrative sanction?

AD: In my research, I interviewed 44 young people who had been repeatedly fined—some of them extremely frequently, sometimes several times a week, even multiple times a day or at once. One thing to note is that, in most cases, the fines are issued in bundles, almost like a “package deal,” as one of the young men I spoke with put it. This bundling of fines is nearly systematic for certain types of offenses. For example, we often see sets of three fines for “spitting” (officially categorized as unsanitary fluid discharge), noise disturbance, and littering. Similarly, during the COVID-19 lockdowns and curfews, this pattern of grouped fines appeared again in a striking way. As a result, those frequently fined young people quickly found themselves with overwhelming debts.

Whenever possible, I collected a full list of fines from each interviewee. For three of them, their debts exceeded €30,000. These are young men between 19 and 22 years old who, just entering adulthood and the workforce, end up burdened with massive debt—which has major consequences in their lives.

Most of these young people come from low-income families, for whom even a single fine represents a significant financial strain. Paying off such large cumulative amounts becomes simply impossible. One interviewee, who owed €15,000 in fines, calculated that his debt was nearly equal to a full year of minimum-wage salary. And when fines go unpaid, they turn into tax debt. The French treasury then initiates collection procedures to recover what the state considers to be owed. Public finance authorities will send bailiffs to assess available assets in the young person’s home and can move to seize funds from their bank accounts.

This in turn leads to avoidance strategies: because they still need access to money in their daily lives, many of these young people avoid opening bank accounts or keeping them funded. They steer clear of official employment so they can be sure to use the money they earn rather than have most of their wages seized. Some quietly admit that the only realistic way to repay their debts would be to engage in illegal activities.

There are also serious mental health consequences. Many of these young people experience acute stress, live in a state of hypervigilance, and constantly monitor their daily behavior—avoiding police at all costs for fear of getting another fine, ensuring their accounts don’t show any funds, etc. They live in a state of constant anxiety and alertness.

Index : There’s a word that comes up a lot in your report: “undesirables”. Who are these “undesirables”? As researchers, how do you define them from a methodological point of view?

MB: The term “undesirables” appears in the police documents included in the investigation file on the case in Paris’s 12th arrondissement. That immediately raised questions for us: Where does this term come from? Who uses it, how is it used, and how is it defined? The first thing to note is that there’s no written definition—at least, we found no internal police memo or directive that defines what an “undesirable” is. Yet, when reading the internal documents, it’s clear that everyone within the police seems to know exactly what it means.

So we asked ourselves: How can we detect this implicit definition within the police force?

To do that, we relied on the hundreds of digital mains courantes (police incident logs) included in the court file—almost all related to minor disturbances in public spaces. Out of 284 reports, in 106 cases the police selected “undesirables” as the reason for intervention. In the others, the reasons were mainly noise complaints or what the police call “miscellaneous nuisances.” That led us to think this could be a useful way to understand the distinction between an “undesirable,” someone committing “miscellaneous nuisances,” and someone making noise.

We then examined the profiles of the individuals targeted in these reports: names, dates of birth, addresses (which let us see whether they lived in the neighborhood), and nationalities. From the names, we inferred gender and likely migration background. We compared the overall profile of the people who were stopped with that of those specifically labeled by police as “undesirables.”

This allowed us to make two key observations. First, the people being stopped by police in general were disproportionately young, male, and from post-colonial immigrant backgrounds. Among the “undesirables,” this pattern is even more pronounced: they were almost exclusively adolescent boys of post-colonial immigrant origin. For instance, among all those stopped but not labeled as “undesirable,” about half had names that sounded European. Among those labeled “undesirable,” only a quarter had European-sounding names, while more than half had names suggesting sub-Saharan origin.

Second, when reading through the reports that specifically mention “undesirables,” we saw that even when police observed no uncivil behavior or offense, they still carried out what they called an “eviction.” Many reports were quite short and read something like: “Encountered about ten undesirables. Evicted them.” Or “Group of four individuals chatting calmly. Evicted them.” By contrast, in noise-related reports, the police usually note that they witnessed actual disturbances, and these rarely ended in eviction.

So when there’s a confirmed noise complaint but the individuals aren’t labeled “undesirables,” police tend to simply ask them to turn down the volume, make less noise, or move along. But when the individuals are tagged as “undesirables,” the police intervene even without any offense being committed, and it almost always ends in eviction. Eviction might mean explicitly telling people to leave, taking them to the station for an ID check, or using what police call “occupying the area,” meaning they stay on site until the group leaves on their own.

What stands out clearly from the 12th arrondissement case file is that, for the police, “undesirables” are adolescent boys of immigrant background who gather in public spaces, usually after school hours. These aren’t people making noise at 2 a.m.—they’re getting evicted at 4:30, 5:00, 6:00 p.m. But they’re always in groups when categorized this way.

And notably, they are almost all French citizens, living in the same neighborhood where they’re being evicted. We even compared their home addresses with the places from which they were evicted—and the average distance was about 500 meters. In short, they’re being evicted from their own neighborhoods.

Aline Daillère: Just to add to what Magda said—my findings are exactly the same. The profiles of those who are repeatedly fined match precisely the ones she described. They are also fined very close to home, and again, it often happens when they’re in groups.

Index: In your study, you highlight a distinction made by the police between “behavior” and “presence.” The mere fact that someone categorized by the police as “undesirable” is present in a certain place can trigger a police response—depending on the assumed identity of the person—whereas certain actual behaviors might lead to different types of police responses. How do you explain this dichotomy between presence and behavior, and how is it interpreted by the police?

MB: What’s interesting—and this is where police interviews are really valuable—is that officers often say: “Actually, the problem is that their presence constitutes a nuisance for residents.” They use the word “residents,” but they don’t necessarily include these young people in that category.

And it’s true that a portion of local residents regularly complain to the police about gatherings of young people, which generate a “feeling of insecurity.” Some residents say things like—“It feels like we’re in the 93” [a reference to the working-class Paris outskirts, ed.], “It feels like a ghetto,” and so on. They’re disturbed by this presence, even when it doesn’t involve any unlawful or disruptive behavior. The police take this idea on board: these presences are bothersome. So, they need to be removed. Some officers even admit that, even if no offense is observed, they know these groups are likely to cause trouble, and that they need to take preventive action and evict them.

From the police perspective, these presences are problematic in themselves because they are presumed to be a source of nuisance—even when nothing has happened or no call has been made. There’s a conflation between certain presences and certain behaviors. For other segments of the population, even when problematic behavior is observed, police often respond with common sense. If someone is being noisy in public, for example, officers might simply ask them to quiet down, informally and without using coercive tools like identity checks, frisks, searches, or fines. So, police do know how to use less aggressive forms of intervention—but they almost never apply them when it comes to “undesirables.”

Index : In one of the police statements that you quote in the report, the term “feeling of insecurity” comes up. How can such a vague concept be enough to justify a police intervention?

MB: One aspect that really interested us in this investigation was trying to understand the role of other actors in shaping these policing practices. Why did the police institution decide, at some point, to start evicting “undesirables”? Was it simply because officers hold certain stereotypes? Or are there other forces at play?

The truth is, there’s external pressure. Some residents—not all, not even the majority—complain very regularly. Then there’s the municipal government. In the 12th arrondissement, at that time, the mayor’s office was relaying resident complaints to the police and explicitly asking officers to take action (patrols, checks, systematic fines, etc.) to prevent young people from gathering in public spaces, in response to citizens expressing a feeling of insecurity due to the presence of racialized young men in public areas.

The “feeling of insecurity,” as you pointed out, is a very subjective notion. When the young men targeted by these practices expressed their own feelings of insecurity—due to police harassment, police violence, or even sexual assault during frisks—these were not treated as valid expressions of insecurity. Nor were they treated as criminal offenses that required legal response.

There’s a key distinction made by police between people they call “residents” and those they label “undesirables.” Even when all of them live in the same neighborhood, police view some as legitimate residents whose sense of insecurity deserves intervention—even when based on racist stereotypes. In contrast, when young people try to speak out about what they endure, the response from authorities is purely rhetorical: a meeting is held, officials explain again why the police intervene, that officers are within their rights. But their complaints are never treated as problems requiring operational responses—at least not in the same way as when a different kind of resident complains about noise outside their window.

Index : Regarding legal recourse, you write in the report that it is almost non-existent. Why is it so difficult to contest these fines?

AD: At the start of my research, many of the repeatedly fined young people I met were trying—with the help of associations and youth workers—to challenge their fines and get them canceled. It turned out that these efforts… I was going to say they failed, but that’s not even it. They simply never got a response to their appeal. They would just receive a notice of increased fines, and so they concluded their challenge had been rejected.

The fixed fine procedure was originally created to reduce the workload of judges by avoiding court proceedings. All procedures related to fixed fines—including appeal mechanisms—are designed to be difficult to access. Because if they were easy, the logic goes, there would be too many appeals, and the courts would be overwhelmed.

So, in reality, contesting these fines is extremely difficult. First, people don’t always realize that the first person to examine an appeal is a public prosecutor’s officer—who is often a local police commissioner. In theory, they’re only supposed to do procedural checks, like verifying that the appeal was sent by registered mail and that the original fine is attached. But in practice, they make decisions on the substance and simply do not forward the case to a police judge. So, they are effectively the ones deciding to reject appeals. This overstepping of their role has been condemned by both the French Cour de Cassation and the European Court of Human Rights.

In these cases, there’s no hearing, no judge—just an increased fine. A 2016 report by the Cour des comptes found that fewer than 1% of appeals are ever forwarded to a court. Making it to a judge is nearly impossible.

And even if you do manage to get a hearing, you face another obstacle: the police report holds legal weight. In misdemeanor cases, if the report says “Mr. X was not wearing a mask,” then the burden of proof is on the person fined to prove it’s false—which is usually impossible.

There are very rare cases where young people have been able to prove a fine was illegal or abusive. In one recent case, a police officer was convicted for issuing false fines. Investigators used cellphone tracking to prove that neither the officer nor the young person was at the scene. The boy’s parents had filed a complaint for falsifying a public document because they knew their son was home that night. But such cases are extremely rare—it’s very hard to gather that kind of proof.

Index : Regarding the trial of the officers from the 12th arrondissement in Paris, how did that legal action start? And what were the outcomes?

MB: The case was initiated by a complaint filed by the young people who had suffered police harassment, and it was made possible by the work of social workers and local associations. In this case, officers had used racist and homophobic slurs, physical violence, and even sexually inappropriate touching during frisks—against boys as young as 14 or 15. These things have long-term effects on their mental health, on how they view themselves, others, and public institutions.

The collective action allowed these young men to put words to their experiences. They were able to see themselves as victims of violence, and experience the legal system not as suspects, but as plaintiffs. The fact that police officers were the ones being accused and that these young men—often of immigrant origin—were recognized as victims was a role reversal that’s still unusual. Such a collective effort is quite exceptional: this kind of mobilization takes tremendous time, resources, and energy—especially from people living in precarious conditions.

There were two trials: one civil and one criminal. In the criminal trial, four officers were charged, and three were convicted at first instance—but they were all acquitted on appeal. In the civil trial, however, the French state was found liable for serious misconduct.

Nevertheless, the officers filed defamation charges against the complainants. In the first trial, the officers won. So, in the end, no officer was convicted criminally, but several plaintiffs were convicted for defamation and must pay damages to the officers. This had serious legal consequences for them, though the decision is currently under appeal.

The IGPN [the police internal watchdog, ed.] conducted an investigation that was fairly thorough, but the facts were hard to prove. Out of 44 allegations, only four were upheld by the court. Most were based on testimonies, which were deemed insufficient. The ones that went to trial had solid evidence: videos, photos, medical certificates, and police reports mentioning interventions. But most allegations lacked that level of proof.

It has to be noted that some evidence did exist but was never taken to court. For instance, the public prosecutor did find that nearly all ID checks on minors had major legal irregularities: officers took minors to the station without presenting them to a judicial officer or without following the correct procedures. They would sometimes leave them on a bench for hours before releasing them. The prosecutor wrote to the precinct chief, warning that continued violations could lead to prosecution for unlawful detention. But no legal action was taken, despite strong evidence of repeated misconduct.

This case was unusually well-supported—with extensive documentation and media coverage. But imagine a single person, without support, trying to file a complaint after being beaten, facing a police officer’s word alone.

Index : To what extent can the results of your study be generalised to the whole of France?

AD: The judicial investigation that Magda worked on specifically concerns the 12th arrondissement, but the one I conducted on repeated fining (multiverbalisation) covers several neighborhoods, both in Paris and the surrounding region: five neighborhoods within Paris proper and three located in the inner and outer suburbs.

If this issue were limited to the 12th arrondissement, one might think it’s just a matter of one police station—or even one specific team within that station. But what’s striking is that the findings observed in the 12th are mirrored almost identically elsewhere, regardless of the neighborhoods I investigated. The fines are the same, the procedures are the same… This suggests we are dealing with something beyond the practices of a single precinct or police team.

We don’t have official documents to prove it conclusively, but everything points to a generalized practice—possibly even a policy implemented across Paris proper and in several towns in the Île-de-France region. Moreover, this phenomenon is also appearing in other regions: for example, a police officer in Tarascon (Bouches-du-Rhône) was recently convicted for issuing false fines.

Another indication that this is part of a broader phenomenon is that, since our study was published, we’ve been regularly contacted by affected individuals from all over France. For example, I was contacted by a youth worker from the Rennes area who said she sees exactly the same things happening with the young people she supports; and we’ve heard similar accounts from youths in the Grenoble area. While we don’t yet have solid empirical data from those locations, all this tends to confirm that the cases we studied are not isolated incidents.

There’s also another very important point. In the case Magda looked into, we saw that the term “undesirables” used by the police was not just a local practice from that specific station. It’s actually a national term, built into the computerized police log system used in all police stations in France. That software includes a tab labeled “undesirables.” This clearly shows that we are dealing with something much broader—systemic, even.

MB: Other investigations have been conducted as well, notably by the Defender of Rights, on policing policies involving the eviction of certain groups. These groups are sometimes labeled as “undesirables” based on ethnic criteria. The Defender of Rights has launched several inquiries following reports and found that national police, municipal police, and even transit police have implemented similar eviction policies, explicitly targeting certain populations such as Roma, Syrians, and others. This strengthens the hypothesis that there is indeed an eviction policy in place—at least in urban areas—aimed at specific groups deemed “undesirable.” Of course, more research is needed to determine whether such practices exist in other types of spaces beyond urban centers. But in any case, in urban environments, several signs indicate that these practices are indeed being carried out—and not just in the Paris region.