Calm the grunt. Faced with the movement of anger in the police, the executive is trying to play appeasement. After meeting with police unions on Thursday, Gérald Darmanin met Friday with Elisabeth Borne to take stock of the crisis. "A meeting as part of the very regular talks between the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior," minimizes within the executive.
The day before, Gérald Darmanin had put forward a series of proposals to meet the demands of the police, in particular on the provisional detention of police officers. "He doesn't see any disadvantages ... to work on article 144 of the code of criminal procedure, which deals with pre-trial detention, so that we put a clause and in particular the police are excluded from this device, in the exercise of their mission of course, "said Fabien Vanhemelryck, secretary general of Alliance, after the meeting.
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However, the idea must be submitted to expertise "to see if the proposals made are feasible," says one within the government. At the end of the summer, the Minister of the Interior will meet with the Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, to report to him. On Friday, senior magistrates expressed "their concern" after the remarks of the Minister of the Interior who had considered that a "presumption of guilt" weighed on police officers in judicial cases, a new "attack" according to them on the independence of justice.
Darmanin will go to Marseille
Tensions between the police and the judiciary have shifted to the political terrain. Also on Friday, the first secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure, denounced "a triumvirate constituted by the Minister of the Interior, by the DGPN (Director General of the National Police) and by the Prefect of Police of Paris, all three of whom defy the republican rules, the great principles that govern us, the independence of justice, the separation of powers, the equality of citizens before the law" before asking "all three" to resign.
In the immediate future, Gérald Darmanin will go very quickly to Marseille to meet some police officers and exchange with them. Since the incarceration of a BAC police officer suspected of beating a 22-year-old man with three other colleagues, the police have been idling. The protest movement spread throughout the country.