Improve the recruitment and training of police officers, upgrade equipment… To restore the essential bond of trust, Gérald Darmanin swept away the
“deadly sins”
of the police in front of the deputies.
Rebuild the link between the population and their police
For the Minister of the Interior, there is
"no divorce between the police and the population"
.
According to him,
“the peacekeepers are rarely children of CEOs, many live in social housing, some in their cars.
(…) Coming from the people, when they take off their uniform, they are the people ”.
To better embrace the aspirations of the population, the host of Beauvau recommends the creation of 30,000 reservist police, a number equivalent to that of the volunteers engaged in the ranks of the gendarmerie.
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Darmanin wants to stave off the polls.
The police, it is true, saw their rating drop by 10% in six months to 60% of favorable opinions collected by Ifop last January.
Two months later, a national survey, led by the Savoie-Mont-Blanc University, painted a mixed picture.
If the internal security forces have been credited with a score of 7 out of 10, it appears that 26% of our fellow citizens believe that they do not meet their expectations.
Worse, their intervention is considered "repressive" by 4 out of 10 French people. In "case of problem", a third of them believe that they cannot count on the police.
"The daily security police have a deep vocation: to build a united and peaceful society in our country
,
"
Gérard Collomb promised by launching in 2018 what was a promise from the Macron presidential candidate.
Since then, Beauvau experts have developed a “Lab '” to measure the effectiveness of the redeployment of forces in the field.
And the population is called upon to support the police by participating in “citizen rounds”.
Strengthen supervision in the field
In front of the national representation, the Minister of the Interior pointed out among the sins of the police, the
"lack of supervision": "There are not enough chiefs, not enough deputy chiefs."
He intends to expand the hierarchy so that the oldest ensure that the young recruits adopt
"calm and exemplary and republican behavior in the face of difficult situations".
On the material level, he deplored a cruel lack of means: officials forced to drive in vehicles totaling 250,000 km, or forced to buy their helmets and their camera-pedestrian out of their own money.
For too long, according to him, his predecessors favored the wage bill at the expense of necessary investments in logistics and construction.
Referring to the
"sin of images"
, the minister noted that if the patrol implicated in the beating of producer Michel Zecler, in Paris, had been equipped with pedestrian cameras, their leader could have noted the disproportion between the images and the facts which they described in the minutes.
This device should be generalized to police and gendarmes on July 1.
Strengthen the initial training system
"Shortening the initial training was not a good measure,"
said Gérald Darmanin.
It is
"a fundamental error"
, he insisted.
He called for the reestablishment of
“more important”
initial training
.
Since this year, to strengthen the operational know-how of the peacekeepers, the duration of training had been increased to only eight months at school and sixteen months of training in “assignment service” in the field.
If it is premature to measure the results, Gérald Darmanin considered that
“being a police officer late at night, in difficult neighborhoods, requires more initial training”
.
This is what he proposed to the President of the Republic on Monday afternoon.
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In terms of continuing training, he recalled that, in the national police,
"only 20% of the staff do their 12 hours of annual training"
.
For those who have a weapon, Darmanin clarified, that in 2019, only 60% of civil servants carried out their three annual shooting sessions.
In July 2018, the senatorial commission of inquiry on
"the state of internal security"
had sounded the alarm signal by stressing that only 80,435 police officers had carried out at least three shooting sessions the previous year.
Or 64.4% of the workforce.
“We owe them the training,”
insisted the minister.
Refocus the police on their core business
The recruitment of "10,000 additional police and gendarmes" is the hallmark of the five-year term.
“The real question is not so much that of the number as of knowing what the police are assigned to
,
”
nuances an influential executive from the Association of Senior Officials of the National Police (AHFPN). To hear him,
“over the years, the tasks entrusted to agents have been piled up and many have lost the sense of their mission”
. Gérald Darmanin has undertaken to restore some order in the specifications of the public security units, by tackling the
"reduction of administrative and undue tasks"
. History of refocusing the police on its core business. But the administration has been doing it for twenty years, without much progress. The Minister of the Interior also wants to put the police back in the heart of the city, by rehabilitating the foot patrols. But delinquency is no longer the same as in the good old days of the islanders of the 1980s. The host of Beauvau is also aware that the deep crisis which grips his troops is due to the weaknesses of the penal response. Its “white paper”, initiated under Laurent Nuñez and Christophe Castaner, aims to draw a new distribution of roles between the police, the gendarmerie, the municipal police and private security. A real safety “continuum” for more understandable and efficient actions. Enough to feed the debates for the next presidential campaign, but for what concrete translation? Reforming the police is a long-term endeavor.