After the Carcassonne Scandal, What Do We Really Know About the Far Right’s Influence in French Policing?
Six hours of accidentally recorded footage from a municipal police patrol in Carcassonne exposed racist, misogynistic and identitarian remarks. Beyond the scandal itself, a much harder question emerges: are there any reliable indicators showing…
Written byZEZ XXI — Mazdak Vafaei Shalmani
Six hours of accidentally recorded footage from a municipal police patrol in Carcassonne exposed racist, misogynistic and identitarian remarks. Beyond the scandal itself, a much harder question emerges: are there any reliable indicators showing whether these ideas remain marginal within French law enforcement, or whether they are actually spreading?
The body camera was supposed to record police interventions. Instead, it ended up recording the officers themselves.
Footage captured in November 2025 by the body camera of a Carcassonne municipal police patrol was revealed in September 2026 by Midi Libre. During the recording, several officers can be heard making racist and misogynistic remarks, including comments targeting Arab, Black and migrant people.
The public prosecutor’s office in Carcassonne opened an investigation. The officers involved were suspended and the case quickly became a national controversy. Le Monde reported that several openly racist comments had been recorded without the officers realizing it.
The case also took on a political dimension: the senior officer at the center of the recordings had been involved with the security detail of the Rassemblement National. Following the revelations, the party announced that he had been removed from its security operation and expelled. According to Le Monde, his links to the RN helped turn what began as a local scandal into a broader political affair.
But can Carcassonne tell us anything about French policing as a whole?
Obviously not.
A handful of police officers recorded inside a patrol vehicle cannot be used to draw conclusions about tens of thousands of officers across France.
But the case raises a much more interesting question: do we have any tools capable of measuring the spread of identitarian, authoritarian or far-right ideas within the security forces?
France does not have an annual “racism barometer” specifically focused on the police.
To understand the phenomenon, we therefore have to combine several indicators: voting behavior, surveys of police officers, union election results, disciplinary sanctions and research into relations between police and the public.
The first indicator is electoral
The most striking numbers come from research conducted by CEVIPOF at Sciences Po.
In a study examining the 2024 European and legislative elections, political scientist Luc Rouban analyzed the voting behavior of different categories of public-sector workers.
In the June 2024 European elections, 46% of police officers and military personnel surveyed said they had voted for the RN. Adding 12% for Reconquête, the far right as a whole reached roughly 58% within that category.
By the second round, the figure was even more striking: 67% of police officers and military personnel surveyed said they had voted for the RN.
These figures have to be interpreted cautiously. Although the broader survey included more than 11,000 respondents, the “police and military” subgroup contained only 208 people. It also grouped together police officers and military personnel, including both active and retired members.
It is therefore not a census of how the entire French police force votes.
But the pattern is significant enough to constitute a political indicator: far-right voting appears to be heavily overrepresented within this professional category.
Voting RN does not mean being racist
This is where an essential distinction has to be made.
Voting for the RN does not allow us to conclude that an individual is racist.
A vote can be motivated by concerns over security, wages, immigration, working conditions, distrust of the government or many other factors.
These numbers are therefore not a “racism rate.”
What they do show is that the security forces represent particularly fertile electoral ground for a political family in which immigration, national identity and authority occupy a central place.
Internal surveys offer another signal
There is also research looking directly at the professional attitudes of police officers and gendarmes.
In 2024, a study carried out by researchers from CESDIP and the Pacte laboratory, with support from the Défenseur des droits, examined officers’ attitudes toward the public, professional ethics and oversight of their profession.
The results painted a mixed picture.
More than nine out of ten police officers and gendarmes surveyed rejected the use of force to obtain confessions. But 59.8% believed that, in certain circumstances, officers should be allowed to use more force than is strictly permitted by existing rules.
The full study is available on the website of France’s Défenseur des droits.
Again, this is not a measure of racism. But it does offer insight into certain attitudes toward authority, coercion and professional rules within the security forces.
Another barometer may be found in the street
There is another way to assess police discrimination: ask the people who encounter the police.
In 2024, the Défenseur des droits commissioned Ipsos to survey 5,030 people living in metropolitan France.
The results showed that 26% of the population said they had been subjected to at least one identity check during the previous five years, compared with 16% in the previous survey conducted in 2016.
But not everyone faced the same level of exposure.
Young men perceived as Black, Arab or North African were four times more likely to be stopped than the rest of the population, and twelve times more likely to undergo what the study described as an “intensive” stop, which could include a pat-down, a search or being taken to a police station.
In addition, 19% of people who had been stopped reported experiencing unprofessional behavior, including insults, overly familiar language or physical brutality.
Discrimination does not necessarily prove ideology
Once again, a shortcut has to be avoided.
A discriminatory stop does not automatically mean that the officer involved consciously subscribes to racist or far-right ideology.
Discrimination can also result from stereotypes, professional routines, group habits, institutional instructions, unconscious bias or the way certain policing missions are organized.
That is precisely why the phenomenon is so difficult to measure.
On one side, there are beliefs.
On the other, there are behaviors.
And between the two lies the culture of a professional group: what a colleague can say, what others tolerate, what provokes a reaction and what gradually becomes normalized.
That is what makes Carcassonne so disturbing
The officers recorded in Carcassonne do not appear to believe they are speaking publicly.
They are not answering a survey. They are not appearing on television. They are not posting on social media.
They are talking among colleagues.
That is precisely what gives the recording its particular significance.
The most radical views are also often the ones people are least likely to admit when they know they are being observed.
Here, a forgotten body camera transformed what was supposed to be a private conversation into a public document.
It obviously cannot tell us what the entire profession thinks.
But it reveals something that opinion polls struggle to capture: how certain ideas circulate within a group.
The real issue may be less about numbers than tolerance
Trying to answer the question “How many police officers are racist?” probably leads to a statistical dead end.
It would be far more useful to measure how many officers regularly hear racist or identitarian remarks from colleagues, how many disapprove of them, how many report them and, above all, how many simply see them as part of the workplace environment.
A police officer holding racist views is, first of all, an individual problem.
A professional environment in which those views can be expressed openly without immediately provoking a reaction becomes a collective problem.
And that is where the Carcassonne case goes far beyond the officers caught on tape.
Political radicalization can be measured. Racism is much harder to quantify
The available data does not allow us to claim that “the French police are racist.”
What it does allow is a more precise conclusion.
Far-right voting reaches particularly high levels among the police officers and military personnel included in available surveys. Other research points to significant tolerance for the use of force beyond formal rules in certain circumstances. Meanwhile, surveys of the general population continue to show major disparities in exposure to police stops depending on perceived ethnic background.
None of these indicators, taken alone, proves the existence of generalized racism within French law enforcement.
Taken together, however, they suggest there are enough warning signs to justify much more precise research into the circulation of racist prejudice, identitarian ideas and authoritarian attitudes inside the security forces.
The body-camera footage from Carcassonne does not provide that barometer.
What it shows is why France may need one.