French police (in popular argot, les flics) are barely polite at the best of times, and can be extremely unpleasant if you get on the wrong side of them. In Paris, the city police forceEmergency number to call for police tel 17. has an ugly history of cock-ups, including sporadic shootings of innocent people and brutality against "suspects" – often just ordinary teenagers and black people. You can be stopped at any time and asked to produce ID. If that does happen to you, it's highly inadvisable to be difficult or facetious. The two main types of police – the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie Nationale – are for all practical purposes indistinguishable. The CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité), on the other hand, are an entirely different proposition. They are a mobile force of paramilitary heavies, used to guard sensitive embassies, "control" demonstrations, and generally intimidate the populace on those occasions when the public authorities judge that it is stepping out of line.
| 