Only two years before the Paris Olympics, the incidents that occurred at the Stade de France during the Champions League final cannot remain unanswered.

The interministerial delegate for major sporting events and the Olympics, Michel Cadot, pleaded Thursday in the Senate for the adoption of a crowd movement detection system.

Heard for two hours by the Senate Law and Culture Committees on the fiasco of the Champions League final at the Stade de France at the end of May, Michel Cadot detailed the points of the report he submitted to the Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne last Friday.

“I have my share of responsibility in this failure”, assumed this former regional prefect and prefect of police.

As he wrote in his report – and already requested – Michel Cadot believes that an artificial intelligence system for detecting crowd movements would be “useful in view of the Olympic Games” and would like to see it integrated into the future law of orientation and programming of the Ministry of the Interior (Lopmi).

“A considerable logistical and organizational challenge”

This system, "without any facial recognition technique", would make it possible "to identify more quickly and upstream situations of progressive congestion" and "to react very quickly", citing in particular one of the neuralgic points for the Olympic Games of Paris, the center of Paris between the Concorde, the Trocadero and the Invalides where many events will take place.

Asked about the feasibility of the unprecedented opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in 2024, on the Seine, which arouses fears in the police community, Michel Cadot explained: "We are able to do this but we need a precisely planned device, which whether on the strictly nautical risks and on the risks of access, controls, fluidity, circulation, number of entry points to avoid bottlenecks", he said, repeating that he was "objectively a considerable logistical and organizational challenge".

Working groups (town hall, police headquarters, and Ile-de-France prefecture) must "return a stage point" with a view to "validation at the end of August at the beginning of September" and "to have it approved by the end of the year 2022,” he said.

“Look what happened in England recently on the edge of the Thames for jubilees and ceremonies with extremely large crowds,” he added to mean that a gigantic gathering by a river could go well.

Work is "in progress" regarding deleted videos

Asked several times about the automatic destruction of CCTV images from the Stade de France, he explained that the decision to requisition these images "relev (ait) du parquet".

He specified that it was necessary to turn to the consortium of the Stade de France to find out if these images could have been "kept" longer "while continuing to ensure daily monitoring".

“I can understand that the citizen has a little difficulty in considering that it is simply a form of automaticity which intervened in this affair,” he commented.

Have the images of public transport and the police headquarters been kept.

At the request of several senators to hear the "supporters", the president of the law commission, François-Noël Buffet, specified that it was "in progress", as well as the hearing of the mayor of Saint-Denis Mathieu Hanotin.

"We have not finished our work", he said, before going on Thursday afternoon with a delegation to the Stade de France to see the security PC installations, and to make "a progress report" .

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  • Sport

  • Champions League

  • Stade de France

  • Olympic Games