Paris (AFP)
The president of the Les Républicains group in the National Assembly, Damien Abad, worried on Saturday about a "fracture of French society" and "anti-police hatred", at the time when several demonstrations against police violence are planned .
"There is no systemic racism, in the sense of the organization by the police or the gendarmerie of an institutionalized and organized racism. On the other hand, the police, as elsewhere in all the other trades, does not escape certain individuals who actually present a racist expression ", estimated Damien Abad on Europe 1.
"What worries me is this fracture that there is in French society, with this double risk, this double pitfall: on the one hand, this anti-cop hatred which will pose a lot of problems in terms of security and of maintaining public order, and on the other, effectively excesses in what can sometimes be individual abuses on forms of racism which are not entirely unacceptable, "he continued.
Asked about the opening of an investigation by the Paris prosecutor's office, seized by the Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner, on racist messages attributed to the police on Facebook, he estimated that it was necessary "to first of pedagogy and then of the sanction ".
"If the facts are true", the police officers implicated will have to "explain themselves" before the disciplinary council "on a certain number of comments," he added.
Several demonstrations are planned for Saturday in France against police violence, notably in Paris, Marseille, Lille, in the midst of a wave of indignation which engulfed the United States after the death of George Floyd.
In Paris, the prefect of police Didier Lallement prohibited rallies organized Saturday against police violence on the Champ de Mars esplanade, after having proscribed other actions planned elsewhere in the capital because of the health crisis.
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