Catching crims

I am now doing volume XXII of the standard edition of Maigret, in which Simenon continues to prompt pondering about the best way to organise the catching of criminals, a pondering first noticed in the story noticed at reference 1.

When I was young, earnest young people often talked about the merits of the examining magistrate system in France, with the examining magistrate said to have a less adversarial approach than our police. To keep an open mind about how a crime had been committed for longer, not so likely to lock onto a likely suspect, never to let go. Talk of this being the result of the French using Roman law as put together in the Code Napoléon, with Napoléon being considered to be rather more than a general who was both very successful and very good at getting people killed.

Simenon, as he and his creation Maigret get older, seems to regret the passing of the days when the branch of the police to which Maigret belonged, the Police Judiciaire, took charge of important criminal investigations, certainly in the Paris area, and carried them through to the end, an end preferably involving the confessions of the criminals. The juges d'instruction - that is to say the examining magistrates - and the Parquet - that is to say the public prosecutors and the judiciary - were around but usually stayed in the background, only getting involved in cases which were either very important, in the public eye (that is to say in the Sunday newspapers) or involving members of the upper classes.

By Volume XXII, the juges d'instruction and the Parquet are poking their noses into everything and the role of senior policemen like Maigret is much diminished. Part of Simenon's position here seems to be class envy. The Maigrets are much more men of the people, while the juges, and particularly the Parquet, wear the old school tie. They look after their own and don't really know or understand the lives of ordinary people or of ordinary criminals. The other part is the fact that the Maigrets have spent a good part of their working life tramping around the haunts and homes of ordinary people. They are much closer to the criminals they are chasing and there is some degree of mutual respect and understanding. They are also much better at snuffling them out.

On the down side, while, as I have mentioned before, there are few if any miscarriages of justice in Maigret's world, there is, at least in the early volumes, plenty of talk of fairly aggressive methods, of passages à tabac - that is to say beatings or perhaps kickings - and fairly aggressive, protracted interrogations, perhaps involving relays of policemen and perhaps lasting many hours. Not the sort of thing expected of police here in the UK...

Another down side, is that in the days of the young Maigret, there seemed to be a very large number of policemen on the ground, on the beat as we would say. And boots (the souliers à clous of the mémoires) on the ground are expensive.

Wikipedia suggests this morning at reference 2 that the examining magistrate system is on the retreat, having been abandoned in several European countries and watered down in its French bastion.

While here in the UK, there has been some swinging of the pendulum regarding the proper relationship between police and prosecutors, once thought to be much too cosy and now thought to be much too remote, or at least it was during my time at the Home Office.

All very difficult, and while there are class and race angles on which party politics are needed, really a matter of organisation, management and control. Probably not matters in which our elected leaders (and opposition leaders), let along our media, are likely to take much interest. They are content just to pay fat fees to management consultants from the likes of Price Waterhouse. Although, to be fair, I dare say these matters do get a reasonable airing in academia.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/les-memoires-de-maigret.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examining_magistrate.

Reference 3: http://www.vie-publique.fr/. A good source on public institutions in France.