They were nearly 22,000 people, an unprecedented mobilization for almost 20 years. At the call of a large inter-union, thousands of police marched on Wednesday afternoon in Paris for a "march of anger" amid the unease of the institution, rising suicides and pension reform. Anger that is not new, since it "has existed for years in the ranks of the police", recalls Jean-Marie Godard, author of "Words of cops, the shock investigation", a book that explores the malaise in the police force through anonymous testimonies of police officers.
Guest of Europe's leading evening newspaper on Wednesday, the journalist remakes the thread of recent years: "There was 2015, the attacks, Charlie, the march of January, we remember his images where police cars goes through the cheering crowd, and behind that stopped. " Support for a harsh criticism in just four years partly explains the dehumanization of the uniform: "There has been a tendency to forget that behind the roll number, there are men, women, families, human beings!"
"With social networks, the use of force by the police is systematically challenged"
A drift that can partly be attributed to the politics of numbers but also to societal events. "After 2015 there were demonstrations against the Labor law, with a lot of law enforcement in sometimes violent demonstrations," says the specialist.
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"But with social networks, the use of force by the police is systematically contested, and even more so since the 'yellow vests' crisis: we have mobilized a new number of police officers, which has led to the maintenance of the order with a lot of loopholes, police officers were taken out of their daily lives, put on a helmet, and sent to the streets, "says the expert. To remedy a situation that led to the death of 35 police officers in 2018 and 52 in 2019, Jean-Marie Godard advocates "to put humanity back into the teams, people feel like numbers! ".