Who remembers it? On the night of May 12 to 13, 2013, while PSG celebrated their Coupe de France victory in Paris, hundreds of rioters spoiled the party and provoked violence on Place du Trocadéro, near the Eiffel Tower and on the Champs- Elysees. “Lack of foresight”, “security disaster”, “image of damaged France”… Nine years later, the day after the Champions League final on May 28, in Paris, between Real Madrid and Liverpool (1-0), the prefect of police Didier Lallement arouses more or less the same criticisms as his distant predecessor, Bernard Boucault.
Nine years later, the Prefecture of Police defends itself more or less in the same terms: “We were confronted with something absolutely unprecedented, advances a framework of the institution. A sequence of unforeseeable causes did not allow us to defeat all the problems, which arose in a very short time. »
Beyond the accusations of amateurism and the political contests, it is difficult to blame the PP for a defect in the preparation of the event, decided and organized in haste, in three months instead of eighteen, after the invasion. Ukraine by Russia (the meeting was to take place in Saint Petersburg). Some 1,680 security agents, 6,800 police officers and gendarmes, including 1,300 around the Stade de France: the planned system does not show any“ no intention of minimizing security issues around this internationally renowned match,” as highlighted in the report of the interministerial delegation to major sporting events, led by the former Paris police chief (from 2015 to 2017) Michel Cadot, and made public on June 10. If the Prefecture of Police has sinned, it is rather by lack of flexibility. Imaginative, perhaps, in a matter – maintaining order – which requires much more creativity than it seems.
Sixteen preparatory meetings
Nothing to say on the preparation side, therefore. Before the match, sixteen meetings were held to discuss all aspects of the match, from parking to signage. Including a dozen under the aegis of Didier Lallement or his chief of staff, David Clavière, not to mention the technical briefings with the direction of public order and traffic of the police headquarters, the French Football Federation (FFF ), representatives of transport organizations, RATP and SNCF in particular. Routing and pre-filtering of spectators, positioning of security forces, everything has been reviewed. Not without a hitch, sometimes.
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