KEY POINTS:
It is a dark evening in a police station on the outskirts of Paris. Philippe Pichon, the 37-year-old chief superintendent, is hunched over documents on a table. But he's not reading interrogations or the reports from a surveillance operation - he is correcting his latest manuscript.
Pichon, senior
policeman, poet, novelist and now best-selling author, is the standard-bearer of a new wave of French cops or "flics" turning to the world of literature and music to voice their grievances.
"A poet can be a policemen and a policeman can be a poet," said Pichon, chief of a police station with 85 staff.
"I am an exalted humanist. Every day on the streets I see the true humanity of things, and I recount them in my work."
Along with Pichon's recently published 400-page work on the daily life and existential angst of a senior French policeman, the first ever published by a serving high-ranking officer, comes a spate of other works by a generation dubbed "creative cops".
The works range from other personal testimonies and meditations on what it means to be a policeman, a 100-page cartoon series created by a 45-year-old veteran agent in the French equivalent of MI5 that details his missions tracking down Islamic militants in Paris, scores of personal or station blogs, to a rap album by an anonymous "brigadier" posted on the internet.
"This is a totally new phenomenon," said Frederic Ploquin, a crime correspondent and police expert. "Before, the only people writing books were retired senior commissioners and your average plod was just a worker or peasant. Now a new generation of police with university degrees and culture are finding ways to express themselves while still serving in the force."
Benedicte Desforges, a chief inspector on the outskirts of Paris, is one.
Her personal blog starts with a poem on the solitude of the police, "as anonymous as the roads ... the bitumen washed in rain, tears and blood". Her book, Flic, which was commissioned by an editor who read her work on the internet, is now on the bestseller lists.
Desforges - one of the few senior female police officers in France - explained that she hoped simply to make the daily life of the flics known to their compatriots. "There are a lot of prejudices. People think all police are racists, violent, corrupt. Our popular image is completely at odds with the truth," she said.
The eruption of literary endeavour - a work on the "true cost of crime" by another senior officer came out last week and a book by the new head of the nation's criminal investigation department will be released in September - is about more than a sudden surge of frustrated writers in uniform. It is about deep discontent among French police.
France has two main police forces, the gendarmes who maintain law and order in the countryside and the 150,000 employees of the national police who are under the control of the Minister of the Interior, who, between 2002 and March, this year was President Nicolas Sarkozy himself.
A controversial hardliner, the future President's tough language and insistence on boosting arrest statistics riled many.
"The police got caught in the crossfire [between politicians and the population]," said Desforges, who, like Pichon, did not seek permission before writing her book.
One row has raged over community policing, rejected both by Sarkozy and his successor at the Interior Ministry, Michele Alliot-Marie.
Last month Alliot-Marie told policemen in the troubled department of Seine and St Denis, just north of Paris, that they "were not there to play football with a few kids" but "to protect locals and crack down on delinquents".
In his book Pichon, who worked for many years in Seine and St Denis, explains how only a respectful police force working together with locals can bring down crime levels.
Another reason for the rush to print is the lack of other ways of voicing grievances, some officers claim. Sarkozy was a "master of the media".
"He monopolised the entire public debate about security and the police."
"No one else got a word in," said one analyst. "It's not surprising that the lid is blowing off now."
Others say that because police unions are preoccupied with pay and conditions, more important issues go undiscussed. One of Pichon's key complaints is the "quantitative not qualitative" treatment of crime: "It has been reduced to a game of numbers."
According to Marc Gautheron, head of one police union, the "statistics culture" has "rotted the life of the police officer".
"Fighting delinquency is a team effort, but they have given us individual objectives," he said. "Everyone ends up looking out for himself ... and ... you end up with idiocies like nicking people for a gram of hash."
The most acerbic of the flood of recent publications is Jamel the CRS, by a member of France's infamous riot control units. A former delinquent in one of the violent areas around Paris where there was rioting 18 months ago, Jamel Bousetta, 25, joined the police because he wanted to see "life from the other side". The book details a series of racist and violent incidents, in a centre dealing with asylum-seekers. The author himself is beaten up by his colleagues.
"I saw people spitting in the food of the detained asylum-seekers, making them stand naked, humiliating them. I saw violence, I saw falsified statistics and I saw petty daily corruption," said Boussetta.
The books have been received positively by the mainstream media. Pierre Dragon's cartoon description of life as an agent of the Renseignements Generaux was praised by the cultural website Evene for its "references to Chandler and Melville".
And it appears that support for the creative cops among their colleagues is widespread, a reflection of the respect in which writers are held in France generally.
Erik Blondin, a constable for the past 25 years, spends his days treading the pavements of Paris' 14th arrondissement, dealing with minor traffic incidents, stolen handbags and the occasional fight.
"It's important for the police, for democracy and for everyone that these voices are heard," he said.
Parading the hip-hop beat
He is an anonymous rapper with a gun and a balaclava. His words touch the standard hip-hop themes of crime, life on the street, violence and drugs. The authorities are trying to track him down.
The only thing that marks out "Le Brigadier" from the thousands of rappers in France's poor suburbs is that he is a policeman.
A word-of-mouth hit on the internet, Le Brigadier's new track starts with the lines, "I am a cop, no one listens to me, they just judge and criticise," and continues in an attack on politicians who exploit crime and insecurity while the "suburbs burn".
Frederic Plonquin, a crime reporter, says, "I've spoken to him. He's the genuine article: an angry cop."
But Le Brigadier is not to everyone's taste. "If the cops start rapping, what's left for us?" said Ahmed Messaoui, a teenage aspirant hip-hop star in Paris' 20th arrondissement. "If he doesn't like being a policeman, he should leave. Otherwise he should stick to arresting people and let us do the music."
Parading the hip-hop beat
He is an anonymous rapper with a gun and a balaclava. His words touch the standard hip-hop themes of crime, life on the street, violence and drugs. The authorities are trying to track him down.
The only thing that marks out "Le Brigadier" from the thousands of rappers in France's poor suburbs is that he is a policeman.
A word-of-mouth hit on the internet, Le Brigadier's new track starts with the lines, "I am a cop, no one listens to me, they just judge and criticise," and continues in an attack on politicians who exploit crime and insecurity while the "suburbs burn".
Frederic Plonquin, a crime reporter, says, "I've spoken to him. He's the genuine article: an angry cop."
But Le Brigadier is not to everyone's taste. "If the cops start rapping, what's left for us?" said Ahmed Messaoui, a teenage aspirant hip-hop star in Paris' 20th arrondissement. "If he doesn't like being a policeman, he should leave. Otherwise he should stick to arresting people and let us do the music."
- Independent
