A Cop Convicted Thanks to an Undercover Reporter: Impunity, Meanwhile, Goes Untried

According to franceinfo, a police officer has been sentenced to one year in prison, suspended, for acts of violence that journalist Valentin Gendrot had recounted in "Flic", a book published in 2020. Working undercover in a Paris police station, the author described "tabassages" (beatings), racist and homophobic insults, but also the lack of resources, suicides and the malaise afflicting officers. The dispatch we have does not specify which facts the court actually upheld, the identity of the convicted man, or any further judicial action. We will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the obvious: it took a journalist slipping under the uniform for months before a court would take hold of the matter. Six years between the book and the verdict. That is not proof that the machine works; it is proof that it does not start by itself. When the institution charged with policing violence needs an outside witness to see it, the question is no longer about one man, but about a mechanism.

The Marxist tradition describes the police, like the courts or the budgets, not as a neutral arbiter but as an institution shaped by property relations and ultimately tasked with protecting them. Its heirs add nuance: the state enjoys relative autonomy, it is also a terrain of struggle, and a conviction is precisely a trace of that struggle. But its limits remain set by the need to keep in place the order through which capital circulates. From this angle, impunity is not a breakdown at all: it is a tolerated function, so long as the violence falls on those whose revolt would cost the established order dearly.

It would be wrong to see this as a matter of "rotten apples". The book itself, according to franceinfo, also speaks of lack of resources, suicides and malaise. Rank-and-file officers are wage earners too, worn down, poorly supervised, sent to the front line of neighbourhoods that public policy has abandoned. Punishing the foot soldier alone leaves intact the hierarchy that sets the orders, the statistics and the silence.

The reformist reflex will want to claim this as a victory: a verdict, therefore a system that corrects itself. Luxemburg would teach us to apply another test: does this measure increase the power and confidence of those who suffer under policing, or does it demobilise them? A suspended sentence, however legitimate, protects no one on the street the following evening. What would genuinely hold the police to account are organised residents, neighbourhoods that document, unions, and collectives that refuse to rely on the goodwill of institutions alone.

A journalist did the work that the inspectorate should have done. Democracy, when it depends on an undercover reporter, still looks like a circle whose door no one has found.