by Vincent Daheron
PARIS, April 25 (Reuters) – Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez assured Thursday that the state was not worried about the private security system deployed during the Olympic Games, from July 26 to August 11.
“I do not confirm what we read in a major daily,” he said during a press conference at police headquarters.
He was referring to an article in Le Monde published Tuesday raising concerns about a possible shortage of private security agents. “The State cannot be satisfied with the extent of these failures,” it is written in the minutes of the meeting of the ministerial committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games on April 15, cited by the newspaper.
“There is no concern from this point of view,” underlined Laurent Nuñez. “We always work on the same bases with this complementarity, this continuum between internal security forces, municipal police and private security.”
“For the moment, we are there, we have no reason to be worried.”
“You know very well that for the opening ceremony, we have a system which is overwhelmingly a state system,” he added while the document revealed by Le Monde recommends a takeover of operations by the State , in addition to the 45,000 police and gendarmes already mobilized on July 26.
According to Tony Estanguet, president of the Organizing Committee for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojop), 98% of private security needs are now covered with 105 companies having won public contracts.
“There is no failure as it stands,” added Marc Guillaume, the prefect of Paris and the Île-de-France region. “In Île-de-France, we had to train 20,000 private security personnel by July 1, we trained 20,000 by March 1.”
“The State had released 46 million euros to purchase this training, it is in the process of releasing additional funds to continue this training,” he added. (Reporting by Vincent Daheron, editing by Sophie Louet)
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