Won over by the CRS 8 sent to Marseille or Nîmes, the Minister of the Interior seems to want to perpetuate the experiment. Gérald Darmanin announced on Friday the creation of a “national investigation unit” on “the CRS 8 model”, this unit specialized in the fight against urban violence, to combat drug trafficking, which he compared to “the battle of Stalingrad”.
In an interview with Parisian, the Minister of the Interior believes that we must “be much more offensive in the area of investigation, on investigations, despite the incredible work of the investigation services”. “We have to contain the octopus. This is the Battle of Stalingrad,” he exclaimed. But Gérald Darmanin gives no indication on the way in which this unit will work, on the way in which its action will be linked with Ofast, the office dedicated to the fight against drug trafficking, which already has national competence and has local branches.
Around a hundred employees
The new unit, made up of “around a hundred personnel including police officers and gendarmes”, will be operational in “the coming weeks”, said those close to Gérald Darmanin. It is a question, it was explained, of being able to project these investigators for several weeks in a city, a place, where trafficking is significant, as the government is doing with CRS 8 to “clean up the deal points” like in Nîmes recently.
“With dogs, investigators specializing in money laundering, and technological means, these investigators will support local services to carry out large-scale operations, either in reaction or in prevention,” argues the minister in Le Parisian. “It goes beyond cleaning up a deal point,” he insists, “because it’s about dismantling networks and defining targets.” “Our challenge,” he said, “is to continue strengthening the judicial system to take in-depth action and put these criminals out of harm’s way in the long term.”