The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, wants a new territorial distribution between the police and the gendarmerie, in an interview with the
Parisian
published Saturday, November 14 in the evening, where he reveals some axes of the white paper of internal security supposed to rethink the organization of this sovereign sector.
“It is out of the question to touch our model, which sees two complementary forces acting.
But there is a bad distribution between the police and the gendarmerie at the national level ”
, asserts the minister.
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In a simplified way, the gendarmerie operates in rural areas and the police in towns.
"But since then, the towns have expanded"
, continues Gérald Darmanin by way of example, so that
"in the Toulouse conurbation, there are four towns under the authority of the police, and all the rest of the area, very urbanized, under the control of the gendarmerie ”
.
"It is necessary without taboo to move towards a more efficient organization"
, he adds, evoking the notion of
"basin of delinquency like those around the public transport or the highways"
.
"A disastrous mistake"
The minister also pleads for increased cooperation between the gendarmerie and the police in
"the maintenance of order"
,
"the technical and scientific police (PTS) or Cyber"
.
In any case, he rules out a fusion of the two forces which would be, according to him,
"a disastrous error"
.
Concerning the police, the minister announces the creation of a "single departmental direction in each department" which will have under its orders
"the public security, the border police and the judicial police"
.
This new organization will be put in place "from the beginning of next year in three metropolitan departments: Pas-de-Calais, Savoie and Pyrénées-Orientales", explains Gérald Darmanin, stressing that
"two of these three departments “Border” are experiencing difficulties linked to immigration ”
.
"The experiment will last a year before the system is generalized if it is successful," he
says.
Finally, the minister advocates
"stronger modernization in certain areas such as that of investigation"
.
“Today, there are 3,000 judicial police officers (OPJ) who no longer do investigative work, while paradoxically we lack it.
It's a bit of a crazy system.
It is necessary to make its attractiveness to the real job of cop, that of the investigation ”
.
The white paper on security, initiated by the predecessor of Gérald Darmanin Place Beauvau, Christophe Castaner, and his Secretary of State Laurent Nunez, required a year of work and discussions between the government, the major police forces and of the gendarmerie and trade unions.
The document is expected to be released in the next few days.