PARIS (Reuters) – Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday the installation of 238 new gendarmerie brigades across France in response to an increased need for security in rural and peri-urban areas.
A campaign promise, this announcement made in Lot-et-Garonne, where the Head of State inaugurated a barracks in Tonneins, corresponds to the installation of one to four brigades per department in mainland France and overseas. , according to the Elysée.
“There is a feeling of being abandoned everywhere,” Emmanuel Macron told the press.
“Then there is delinquency which is there, which has evolved in its forms in recent years,” added the president. “We especially saw that the distancing and concentration of forces which had long been the doctrine, although it had produced results in the face of certain forms of delinquency, did not prevent it in rural areas (…)”
Some brigades will be fixed but the majority will be mobile, equipped with half a dozen soldiers.
Three months after the urban violence following the death of a young man at the end of June in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine) and ten months before the Olympic Games in France, the government is emphasizing security outside major cities .
The presidential announcements represent some 2,100 gendarme positions which are part of the 8,500 job creations within the police promised by the end of the five-year term.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Pineau, editing by Kate Entringer)
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