The executive tries to restore calm in the police

Calm the grumbling. Faced with the movement of anger in the police, the executive tries to play appeasement. After meeting the police unions on Thursday, Gérald Darmanin spoke with Élisabeth Borne on Friday to take stock of the crisis. “A meeting within the framework of the very regular talks between the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior”, is minimized within the executive.

The day before, Gérald Darmanin had put forward a series of proposals to respond to the demands of the police, in particular on the provisional detention of the police. “He sees no drawbacks (…) to working on article 144 of the code of criminal procedure, which relates to pre-trial detention, so that we put a clause and that in particular the police are excluded from this device, in the exercise of their mission of course”, explained Fabien Vanhemelryck, Secretary General of Alliance, at the end of the meeting.

The idea must however be submitted to expertise “in order to see if the proposals made are feasible”, says one within the government. At the end of the summer, the Minister of the Interior will meet the Keeper of the Seals, Éric Dupond-Moretti, to report to him. On Friday, senior magistrates expressed "their concern" after the remarks of the Minister of the Interior who had considered that a "presumption of guilt" weighed on the police in court cases, a new "attack" according to them to the independence of justice.

Tensions between the police and the judiciary have shifted to the political arena. Also on Friday, the first secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure, denounced “a triumvirate made up of the Minister of the Interior, by the DGPN (director general of the national police) and by the prefect of police of Paris, who all three challenge the republican rules, the great principles that govern us, the independence of justice, the separation of powers, the equality of citizens before the law" before asking "all three" to resign.

In the immediate future, Gérald Darmanin will go very quickly to Marseille to meet some police officers and discuss with them. Since the incarceration of a BAC police officer, suspected of having beaten a 22-year-old young man, with three other of his colleagues, the police have been idling. The protest movement has spread across the country.