Police nationale

One of two records (Police nationale and Gendarmerie nationale) for French use of algorithmic video surveillance; the account below covers both forces.

Piloted at the Paris 2024 Olympics for crowd management and threat detection, flagging anomalies for a trained human operator rather than acting automatically. The legislative history is unusually tangled and worth recording precisely, because the experiment has now been extended twice after being struck down once.

The original Olympic-law authorisation was due to expire 31 March 2025. A first extension attempt, attached to transport safety legislation, was censured by the Conseil constitutionnel on 24 April 2025. The experiment was then extended to 31 December 2027 by the JOP 2030 law, upheld by the Conseil constitutionnel in March 2026, with an evaluation report due 30 September 2027. The loi Ripost, definitively adopted 21 July 2026, extended it again to 31 December 2030 and widened its scope from public roads and event perimeters to the interior of buildings open to the public, subject to Interior Ministry authorisation.

Ripost also opens a separate and distinct experiment, running to 31 December 2027, permitting algorithmic analysis of surveillance footage in retail premises, supermarkets and shopping centres for the sole purpose of preventing theft. That is framed with its own safeguards: no biometric identification or facial recognition, mandatory human review, a CNIL impact assessment, a register of actions taken on alerts, and a published conformity attestation.

Worth noting against the direction of travel: the official evaluation committee found the Olympic pilot's technical performance uneven and its operational value limited. The extensions have proceeded regardless.

Update, November 2026. The Conseil constitutionnel ruled on the loi Ripost on 14 August 2026 (decision no. 2026-915 DC, partly unconstitutional, with reservations). Its press release states that the extension of the algorithmic video surveillance experiment was upheld subject to a reservation that, "s'agissant de certains bâtiments", the authorisation "ne peut excéder trois mois". Leto, a legal information site (7 October 2026), reports that this applies to buildings exposed to a permanent risk and that the authorisation can be renewed while the conditions for it are still met. The law was published as Law no. 2026-798 of 18 August 2026 (Journal officiel no. 192, 19 August 2026). The video surveillance provision was Article 19 of the bill as adopted in July; Leto gives it as Article 50 of the published law, in which Article 19 concerns the unlawful occupation of land. Leto also reports that the government's evaluation report to Parliament is due no later than 30 September 2030.