William Molinié / Photo credits: Ludovic MARIN / POOL / AFP 6:45 a.m., March 19, 2024

Perpetrators of violence against police officers risk up to ten years in prison, but that does not stop offenders from increasingly attacking them: more than 40 are injured every day.

This is why the Alliance union is calling for the introduction of minimum sentences.

Are the penalties against attackers of police officers sufficiently dissuasive?

The penal code has been toughened and perpetrators of violence against police officers now risk up to ten years in prison.

But that did not prevent around fifty rioters from attacking the La Courneuve police station, in Seine-Saint-Denis, on Sunday evening.

Overall, more than 40 police officers are injured every day, and the leading cause of injuries is assault by a third party.

This curve has only been increasing for three years while the theoretical sentence for perpetrators of violence against the police has increased from seven to ten years in prison.

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“Everything is scalable”

This is proof, for Éric Henry, national delegate of the Alliance union, that minimum sentences must be introduced.

“Application by the courts is clearly insufficient. What we want is automatic sentencing, that is to say a threshold below which the magistrates, the court, will not be able to go,” he says at the microphone of Europe 1.

In 2021, the Castex government excluded this proposal, deeming it contrary to the Constitution.

“Everything is evolving, the Constitution itself is evolving, abortion has been constitutionalized, so the laws are also evolving,” explains Éric Henry.

“The hierarchy of standards is not fixed, fortunately. This is also a state of law, it lives, so we should not prohibit anything,” he continues.

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In fact, the justice system lightly punishes perpetrators of violence against police officers.

In 2019, according to the latest figures available, the average sentence handed down was only eight months in prison.