Leaving your car registration at home can get you locked up in France

After ending up in a holding cell almost a year ago, she now gets around in her banged-up Nissan Micra. The memory of the night of March 31, 2009 still haunts Pinot, who used to be a dean at a high school. She spent half that night in a holding cell and the other half guarded by two police officers in a hospital. All because she objected to a traffic ticket.

“I begged them on my knees to let me go to the bathroom,” she recalled in a recent interview in her home in Le Pecq, a commune just west of Paris. “Or at least let me get undressed so I could pee on the floor. Making a women soil her clothes is paramount to torture.”

250,000 extra arrests

The French police has been embroiled in controversy since it was revealed it had taken 830,000 people into temporary custody last year, 250,000 more than the official figure cited by the police. Home affairs minister Brice Hortefeux was quoted as saying the true number “knocked him out of his chair” with surprise.

The official figure of 580,000 arrests was already twice as high as the number at the beginning of this century. Hortefeux was forced to acknowledge the official number had not included people locked up after traffic violations, such as Verleine Pinot.