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The target was amended in 2008 to encourage the police to concentrate their efforts on bringing more serious offences to justice and in 2010 it was abandoned -see Padfield et al. 2012 and Kemp 2014. 8 A more detailed account of the methodology is set out in ch. 2. 9 Non-lawyers can provide police station legal advice if they have been accredited to do so (see Hodgson and Kemp 2015, p. 139. 10 The cases were drawn from those pleading not guilty at court and so they had not been convicted at the time the tapes were examined. 17 This approach was observed in the four jurisdictions in the Inside Police Custody study: see Blackstock et al 2014, ch. 5, especially p. 243-255. Research has shown that suspects can become confused about their legal rights, particularly if read out quickly and/or unintelligibly by the police. This could be either due to the routine way in which custody officers regularly read out to suspects their legal rights or as a ploy designed to discourage them from having legal advice: see Kemp 2012, p. 28-33.

Using observational and interview data from my own empirical study of the investigation and prosecution of crime in France, this article examines critically the extent to which three features generally considered central to inquisitorial procedure – hierarchy, bureaucracy, and ideology – exist within the structures and procedures of the French criminal process and the constraining impact they have upon the decision‐making of the procureur, the judicial officer responsible for supervising the majority of criminal investigations. A broad degree of discretion is found to exist at the local and individual level and the unavailability of resources further increases disparities in practice. Nevertheless, the conventional ‘ideals’ retain a continuing force and relevance for procureurs, who describe their work (both as they understand it to be and as they would wish it to be) in these terms and whose crime control orientation is shielded by redefining it in terms of ‘representing the public interest’.