The French police, who used to wonder if they would be killed in a raid, are now worried about whether they will end up in prison.
Tempers have not calmed down since the riots in July: law enforcement officers were even forbidden by state bodies to "verbally" stand up for their arrested colleagues. The police, on the other hand, were content to imprison their colleagues who acted against speeders and rioters, usually from a migrant background. In protest, every second police officer went on sick leave in Nice. But what does "code 562" mean?
While it seems to the superficial outside observer that the moods in France have calmed down, the embers of tensions that almost turned into civil war continue to glow beneath the surface. The state authorities use a wide variety of means to curb the indignant police force, which objects to the procedures against their colleagues.
The protest of the "blues", the uniformed bodies responsible for law enforcement, is spreading to ever wider areas of southern France.
The core of the tensions can be traced back to the riots at the beginning of July and the police measures taken at that time.
The reason for the "blues"'s new uproar is that an officer of the special police forces was placed in pre-trial detention in Marseille last Friday..
He is suspected of "beating" a young man during the riots in early July, Le Figaro reports. (Each such case involves a "peacefully rioting" arsonist, whose North African background immediately triggers the immediate, coordinated action of programmatically sensitized judicial bodies, left-leaning media outlets, and similar parties and "civil organizations" - ed.)
However, not a single word is heard about the case when policemen on day off were lynched by the mob in Marseille.
Unusually, the director of the national organization of the police, Frédéric Veaux, also expressed his anger at the court's decision, stating that "a policeman has no place in prison before a trial." The President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, responded by repeating that "no one in the Republic is above the law". However, these words did not convince the ranks of the national police in the least: "sick leave" and calls from trade unions for minimal work became widespread, and this represents a greater burden than ever before for the law enforcement agencies.
"We are not asking for any special treatment, we are primarily republicans," points out Laurent Martin de Fremont, Alpes-Maritimes representative of the UNITE SGP police union. According to him, it is not some kind of derogation system that the police are missing, "rather just a bit of common sense: we are not disputing pre-trial detention as such. In some cases, this is even necessary if the accused poses a danger or is likely to escape. But in this case, our colleague cannot put pressure on anyone or leave for the other side of the world".
Along with most police officers in Marseille and elsewhere, de Fremont believes a simple judicial review would have been sufficient in the case. “They will.. us! They don't respect our work and it can't go on like this! We used to wonder if we were going to be killed on a mission, now we were wondering if we were going to end up in prison!”
The union outburst is a good example of the mood of the police force. To stand by their colleagues in Marseille, since last Friday in the Alpes-Maritimes region, as in other parts of France, many police officers have adopted the "code 562" at the request of the unions.
It's a codified standby that allows them to do nothing outside of emergency deployments.
Moreover, in the Alpes-Maritimes region and especially in Nice, every fourth police officer is on sick leave. "Many of my colleagues have caught a stubborn virus," joked the local UNITE SGP representative. Of course, in this case too, the local law enforcement officers protest because of the proceedings against the police. However, the spread of the "virus" has serious consequences for public safety: the Ariane and Saint-Augustin police stations in the Nice district were forced to close on Monday.
The Alpes-Maritimes prefecture declined to provide details on the number of police officers on sick leave or under the "562 code" when contacted by Le Figaro.
The displeasure of the Nice cops was only heightened by the handling of a recent case in court. On July 20, a police officer was injured in the line of duty when he tried to avoid a vehicle speeding towards him. The suspect then injured four other police officers when he drove into their car.
The runaway was arrested and taken into police custody. At first, he was charged with "attempted murder against an official", but the case was quickly reclassified as "resisting arrest" and "violence" against the responding police officers. The penalties for these cases are orders of magnitude lighter. This provoked the anger of the police in Nice, who took the reclassification of the facts as a slap in the face. "That was the last straw," said one officer.
Regarding the procedure against the police, Le Parisien quotes the national head of the police organization: "Police officers must account for their actions, including in court, but also take into account the guarantees they enjoy, which distinguish them from criminals or from thugs," declared Frédéric Veaux.
This view is shared by the prefect of the Paris police, Laurent Nuñez, who supported Veaux's opinion in a Twitter post.
This support was met with sharp indignation on the left of the political spectrum, reports the Paris paper. The first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, called it "extremely serious" that "the entire police hierarchy puts itself above the law and the rules of pre-trial detention," he tweeted before calling an emergency parliamentary session.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the old-fashioned Trotskyist leader of one of the strongest parties of the parliamentary left, the far-left LFI (Disobedient France), launched another outburst against the Minister of the Interior and the President of the Republic. According to him, "Darmanin, Macron and members of the Republican circle are not willing to call on the police to calm down and respect the law," so he said these politicians are encouraging the body to "carry on a war."
Speaking to the BFMTV news channel, Mélenchon called for "a police force as disarmed as possible". According to him, the police should be deprived of as many of their weapons as possible.
With a completely different emphasis, conservative voters also feel that the tension has subsided instead of its strengthening. Commenting on an article by the conservative newspaper Valeurs Actuelles about police dissatisfaction, one reader asked: "if a hundred or a thousand or all of the police have to open fire, will they all end up in prison?" And who will protect us afterwards if there is an attack, a demonstration, a riot or something worse? This will be worse than a civil war!”
