A new release on the fight against drugs. The Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin announced a new report showing 1,738 arrests since March 19 and the launch of the “Place net XXL” operations, during a trip this Saturday at the start of the afternoon dedicated to one of these operations in Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis). “33 operations” were carried out in the Paris region, also indicated the Minister of the Interior, reporting “319 detained in five days”.
Launched with great fanfare in Marseille in mid-March, with the surprise visit of Emmanuel Macron, this campaign then multiplied in the North, in the Paris region, in the Lyon metropolitan area, in Dijon and Clermont-Ferrand. Others are promised in the coming weeks. “1,357 arrests”, Gérald Darmanin announced this Thursday, including “751 judicial targets”, described as “kingpins” and “notorious traffickers”.
“A lot of referrals”
Among them, the Minister of the Interior assured that there are “many referrals and committal warrants”. The Ministry of Justice, however, has still not communicated on the legal consequences. In Lyon, of the 54 people placed in police custody, four have been incarcerated at this stage, according to the prosecution. In Marseille, the judgments for immediate appearance, called “Macron procedures” by a Marseille lawyer, have not doubled as had been anticipated, noted AFP.
“They arrested massively but it did not result in legal action. They stopped the small, very easily replaceable workforce,” reports Juliette Oberti, lawyer for a Lyon “jobber” who went to the Marseille city to keep watch on a deal point. “We are polluted by an agenda that is not a judicial agenda,” complains Me Xavier Raes, lawyer for another watchman on a Roubaix deal point. The Lille public prosecutor's office demanded a 9-month suspended prison sentence; he ultimately received 140 hours of community service.
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“If a lookout is a notorious trafficker, that doesn’t mean anything. The real bosses are not arrested,” said a police officer from an anti-narcotics squad in Toulouse. “These are chin thrusts to give yourself the illusion of still being able to have control over the situation,” says another specialized police officer from Île-de-France. Maintaining the ground over time is a challenge. The police “do this for nothing, because they are not going to spend the whole year watching who comes in and who goes out,” said Sabrina Louazi, 22, resident of Roubaix.
“I won’t be able to keep things clean every day,” admits a departmental police officer. “We must favor the qualitative” to build “concrete cases, otherwise the justice system will release them and we will look like rednecks”.
“It has to be non-stop”
The arrests, often targeting offenses committed by an organized gang, involve "four-day police custody", i.e. a "colossal investigation time for results which are not related to the investment", deplores a prosecutor of province. The magistrate recognizes, however, that this gives pleasure “for a while to those who live near the deal points”.
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The “shelling” strategy can work, believes a PJ investigator in Marseille. “We see it in the city of Paternal, calm has returned for the moment. But it has to be non-stop.” Above all, believes this police officer, we must “stop doing nothing but repression”. “You catch the little dealer and then you talk, you try to get information to move up the chain quietly.”
As for seizures, the results do not match the exceptional waste of manpower – more than 15,000 gendarmes and customs officers engaged over several weeks. Gérald Darmanin reported the seizure of 150 kg of drugs and 2.4 million euros. This Friday, ten days after the start of the operation, only some 75 kg of narcotics had been seized in Marseille, 2.5 kg after the first day in the North and “half a tablet”, or a few dozen grams, in Colombes (Hauts-de-Seine) during a raid which mobilized around a hundred police officers including the Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI).