Higher, stronger, more beautiful. Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday that he wanted “To double the police on the ground by 2030”, in particular by the elimination of ancillary tasks and reorganizations. Like all his predecessors, rather on the right, the President of the Republic promises the return of blue to the streets. “Navy blue will become fashionable again”, explained in 2002 Patrick Devedjian, speaking of the CRS. Then Minister Delegate for Local Freedoms he defended the line of the Minister of the Interior, a certain Nicolas Sarkozy, who was going to abolish the community police created by Lionel Jospin a year later. Emmanuel Macron himself used the same expression in April 2021 in an interview with Le Figaro: “Each French person will see more blue on the ground in 2022 than in 2017. It reassures people, it deters delinquents. I am fighting for the right to a peaceful life.“
The measure of the day, which is in fact not new and had already been announced in September in Roubaix, should come in addition to the creation of 10,000 law enforcement positions since the start of the five-year term, said the president. of the Republic in Nice, in front of elected officials and associations, during his trip to estrosian lands, a supposed high place of internal security in France.
“Put an end to undue tasks”
Emmanuel Macron explains that to achieve this objective over the next five years, the orientation and programming law of the Ministry of the Interior (Lopmi) will have to put “An end to undue tasks”, such as guarding public buildings or transferring detainees. In total, this should make it possible to “3,500 police and gendarmes” to put them on the public highway. In addition, the President of the Republic plans to accelerate the release of police and gendarmes from administrative tasks. “There will be no more, he explains, from 2023 only one of these personnel active in administrative control functions at our borders or in the management of administrative detention centers (CRA). “
An effort that seems ambitious given the massive recruitments of recent years have barely offset the many retirements, some of which were anticipated by the effect of the accumulation of overtime converted into leave. In ten years, the police force has increased by only 1% and some police missions have even lost positions. This drop in public road staff is linked in particular to the rate of engagement of staff in the field. The Court of Auditors has noted since 2011 “A continuous decrease in the presence on the public highway”, with a rate of around 39% that year to a little less than 37% in 2020. This does not prevent Emmanuel Macron from hammering since the start of the five-year term they are putting “More blue on the ground”. “The new employment doctrine announced in August 2017, the” daily security police “has not, for the moment, resulted in a greater police presence on the ground”, soberly notes the Court of Auditors.
On the side of the police unions, the news is rather well received, even if we are waiting for details to decide. “The building guards, the transfers of detainees, it still exists, explains Thierry Clair of the Unsa Police union. It is essential to make time for officials to be on the ground. Today, a 10-minute intervention will immobilize an officer for two to three hours, if only for procedural questions. “ An opinion shared by the sociologist and former police officer, Jean-Michel Schlosser. “This would allow greater prevention through deterrence and would increase the opportunities to commit flagrante delicto. Then, if we do not improve the penal response, the multiplication of arrests will not have real consequences, it will be a bottleneck. I do not incriminate justice which probably has budgetary problems. ”
But not all unions agree, like the speech of the minority union Sud Solidaire: “Fighting against insecurity means developing social policies to fight inequalities; it is investing in public services; it is to ensure decent living conditions for all. Fighting against insecurity by doubling the number of police officers, by generalizing pedestrian cameras and fixed fines, by simplifying the criminal procedure to attack the rights of the defense, by removing reminders of the law and by piling up security laws is a dead end.”
A desire to take ownership of the subject of security
For the sociologist of Cesdip Olivier Cahn, the difficulties of the police in the field are not so much related to staffing problems. “We are all the same the European country which knows the most police officers compared to the number of inhabitants. It is astonishing, if we look at the point of view of the promotion of the private security continuum, to note that, even by giving missions to municipal police forces and to private security, we still need more national police officers on field.” No more national police officers but for what? Additional arrests? No more flagrante delicto? Feed a presence supposedly reassuring for the population? Christian Mouhanna, sociologist at the head of Cesdip, regrets the lack of ideas on the security issue. “There is no renewal, no original idea, the same discourse on incivility that has been repeated to us since the 1990s … While we have a criminal law almost every six months on average”, he denounces.
The researcher takes the example of the daily security police, which we have not sufficiently evaluated for our liking. “But who are the police officers who will make contact with the population? We have never had any feedback from the experience of the daily security police. We didn’t know what it was, we still don’t really know it yet, but there may have been some interesting initiatives locally? We don’t even have a somewhat clear balance sheet. ”
For the director of Cesdip, Emmanuel Macron rallies to the rhetoric of repressive security: the fight against drugs as a spearhead for example, where reflections on the legalization of cannabis are being initiated all over the world. “We repeat what the Zemmour, Le Pen or Pécresse say. We are told that the level of authority has dropped, why not, but how do we improve it? There is a lack of reflection, the Ministry of the Interior works a lot in an emergency, it knows more or less well how to adapt to crisis situations, but it is not a ministry that thinks so much. He often sits on History and tends to always make the same reforms. When we see the results of the White Paper on Homeland Security … We have sidelined most of the researchers, which is a clue all the same. “