TESTIMONY
"Without a republican order, there is neither security nor freedom. This order is guaranteed by the police and the gendarmes on our soil," said Emmanuel Macron, Sunday evening after the demonstrations against police violence. Words which were welcomed by the police, who nevertheless regretted that they had not been fed more. Guest of Europe 1, Saturday evening, Juliette Alpha, police officer in Paris, said how much these words had reassured her. "We needed this," she says. "Because we tend to wonder why we are doing all this," said the peacekeeper, who spoke of "a blatant lack of recognition".
"The police have no more authority"
Also the author of Vis ma vie de cop (Hugo Doc), Juliette Alpha deplores the difficulties of ignoring a period when "we only talk about the police". "It's very hard to ignore the filth that we can get caught in the face, even out of service."
Especially since, according to Juliette Alpha, these recurring criticisms torpedo the work of the police. "The current context means that the people we control have the impression of having total legitimacy and total impunity to be able to challenge the least control and the least word of the police officer," points out the policewoman. Today, "the police no longer have authority," she insists. "When a policeman gives an order to someone, he is systematically challenged, or almost," says Juliette Alpha. Recalling that the police represent above all policing and the vocation to protect and serve, the peacekeeper assures him: "I was not a cop to be a combatant, I was a cop to help !"
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"It's spitting in their faces"
On the existence of racism in the police, Juliette Alpha believes that the prefecture of police and the Ministry of the Interior "do not hide it, since the police are like the population". "There are bad apples, but the problem is that there is an amalgam," she denounces. "At a time when we advocate the 'no amalgamation' for everything and for nothing, the police do not have the right to do so."
"You have 150,000 police officers in France, and I find that it's spitting them in the face and flouting the wonderful work they do on a daily basis," regrets Juliette Alpha. So, in order to reconcile the population with their police, the one who is herself a police officer and ensures that she never regretted her choice of profession encourages the media to show more the work of the emergency police. "The daily police, that which is called when things are not going well (...) not that of the demonstrations, because the demonstrations are only 10% of our missions," she said. "The emergency police means 3 million operations a year," says the policewoman, who adds that those that go badly represent only a tiny fraction.