Police in Paris on October 30, 2020. – Thibault Camus / AP / SIPA
One year before the presidential election, Emmanuel Macron talks about “security”. This sovereign subject is erected as one of the priorities of the executive for the end of the five-year term while it remains identified as one of the President’s Achilles heels, especially facing the right.
While preparing to make a trip to Montpellier on this subject on Monday, the Head of State promises in an interview with the Figaro published Sunday evening to meet its objective of 10,000 additional police and gendarmes and to make the fight against drug trafficking “the mother of battles”. “Each French person will see more blue on the field in 2022 than in 2017. […] I am fighting for the right to a peaceful life, ”he explains.
Creation of a “war school”
Emmanuel Macron recalls that since the start of the five-year term “4,508 police officers and 1,706 gendarmes have already been recruited”. “We will have in addition, from this year, 2,000 more police and gendarmes” of which “most” will go “directly on the public highway”. The Head of State also announces the creation in Montpellier of a “war school with continuing education” for the police. The president is also counting heavily on the deployment of pedestrian cameras, as part of the comprehensive security law just adopted in Parliament: they will help “prevent slippages” and “inhibit violent people”.
He also returns, during the interview, to “police violence”, an expression he used in December but to immediately contradict it. This time, he wants to be extremely clear: “There is no systemic violence by the police, it is false; there is no systemic racism in the police, this is false, any more than there is in the gendarmerie or within the state ”. But he repeats that facial control is a reality. “If in all the polls, all the field surveys, young people tell you that they undergo face checks, tell them: ‘no, there isn’t, it’s a feeling you have’, it is as insane as going to explain to people: “you may have a feeling of insecurity but it is not a reality” “.
A great debate on drugs
In the Figaro, the Head of State also particularly criticizes drug trafficking which “forms the economic matrix of violence”. “Eradicating them by all means has become the mother of battles, since drugs innervate certain separatist networks but also everyday crime”.
The government is therefore, according to him, in the process of shifting “into high gear”. “Out of the 4,000 deal points listed recently, more than 1,000 punch-down operations have been carried out in recent weeks. And every day, we close a deal point ”. “France has become a country of consumption and therefore, we must break this taboo, launch a major national debate on drug consumption and its deleterious effects”, he wishes.