"No divorce between the police and its population", according to Darmanin

Gérald Darmanin, Minister of the Interior -

"I do not share the fact that there is a divorce between the police and its population," said Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, heard Monday by the National Assembly's Law Commission, after a series of police violence.

"There is no need to reconnect, this thread has never been lost, but there is to understand the difficulties experienced by the police and also to understand how the population today wishes to exercise legitimate force. », Also indicated the minister.

"Prefect Lallement has my full confidence," said the Minister of the Interior.

“Prefect Lallement has a boss, he is the Minister of the Interior.

I have neither love nor hate for Préfet Lallement (…) he is a hard-working civil servant, who has never lied to me, who heads one of the most difficult posts in France ”.

"And I have noticed since I have been in post that he is not failing in his duties," he said of the Paris police chief. "

Individual problems

Reaffirming that the acts committed by the police officers implicated in the beating of the music producer Michel Zecler were "unspeakable", Gérald Darmanin considered that "the individualities are not a whole", warning that he "would not bear not that we undermine the institution of the police and the gendarmerie.

Why these acts?

No doubt because of individual behavior, perhaps also structural problems which are not new ”.

It is necessary "to give to the police force of the Republic, to the national gendarmerie, the means of the exemplarity which one requires of them", said the minister during this hearing, before listing according to him the "seven sins capital ”which weighs on the police.

Deadly sins

First sin in his eyes, "the little training we offer our police."

“A national police officer is 12 hours of annual training,” he said.

"Only 20% of police officers work these 12 hours per year in 2019".

To remedy this "I proposed to the President of the Republic this afternoon" a "more important initial training", said Gerald Darmanin.

Second sin, according to the minister: "the fact that there are not enough leaders".

It is necessary "to recreate an intermediary body of supervision more numerous with the police officers and the police officers and the gendarmes on the ground", he argued.

Then come the problems of "material" and "images", respectively third and fourth sins, said the minister, reaffirming the interest of pedestrian cameras, which will be generalized on July 1, as he had announced.

The IGPN reform mentioned

Fifth sin: "the question of inspections".

The minister considered that “if reform” of the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) there is to be done, it would be necessary “that the recommendations” of the IGPN in terms of administrative sanctions be followed by the Minister.

He argued that if the IGPN were "as bad" as some say "the public prosecutor" of Paris "would not have seized" the investigation into the violence suffered by Michel Zecler.

Finally, to strengthen the link between the police and the population, the minister recommended increasing the number of police members of the “reserve” to 30,000, ie the same level as the reserve of the gendarmerie.

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Society

Producer beaten in Paris: The provisional detention of the police, an extremely rare measure

• Police

• Society

• Police violence

• Gerald Darmanin