“These are measures and announcements that go in the right direction“, said Wednesday, September 7 on franceinfo Christophe Rouget, secretary general of the Union of internal security executives CFDT, about the orientation and programming bill (Lopmi) of the Ministry of the Interior presented in the Council of Ministers This text will make it possible in particular to strengthen the workforce of the police: 8,500 police and gendarme posts will be created in five years in France, including 3,000 from 2023. The trade unionist, however, calls for “drastically lighten the criminal procedure” because “the police work in a vacuum” if “justice can’t hit hard and fast“.
franceinfo: 8,500 more police and gendarme posts over the next five years, including 3,000 next year. Are these numbers necessary?
Christophe Rouget: These are measures and announcements that go in the right direction, particularly in a context where we now have a reform of the national police which plans to place all the police services in a department under the authority of a single departmental director dependent on the prefect. This reform is very anxiety-provoking, generates discontent and was badly prepared, badly put together. We are waiting for the Minister of the Interior to amend this reform to allow our colleagues in the judicial police to work on the whole spectrum of delinquency throughout the territory, at the regional level, to be effective and correspond to the expectations of the French . These numbers arriving, that’s good, but it’s not enough because today, if you put more police officers on the ground, you have more investigations and more judgments. We have to drastically lighten the criminal procedure because otherwise you have more police officers, more arrests and if you have too much paperwork to do and behind the justice system cannot hit hard and fast, then the police work in the void.
1,000 new police officers will be assigned to Paris for the 2024 Olympics. Will there be time to train them?
Often, in this ministry, we have something that is complicated, it is that we have a minister who has a strong political will to move things forward, to move quickly. However behind, we have a machine that can’t keep up. We have technical-administrative meanders which mean that the measures announced are not on schedule. For the Olympic Games, we will have to recruit and train these people and we are within tight deadlines. Let’s hope the machine can start. There is a real modernization effort to be made in this area. When you are in the center of the world, you can have terrorist attacks or you have everyday crime issues that are important. So indeed, it is an issue for all of us. We will all be mobilized to ensure the security of these Olympic Games and to ensure that France can organize this major event in the best possible security.
Police will also arrive in major cities in the coming weeks. Will these reinforcements be useful?
Obviously, they are useful because we need investigators. Police clerks will be needed to facilitate the work of investigators. We need people who will patrol and cyber patrollers. We need people who are going to deal with all the cyber delinquency which is the delinquency of tomorrow. We can clearly see the evolution of delinquency towards these areas. But there too, if we have patrol officers, investigators, we must be able to have access to telephone data. The heart of our police action is on the telephone, on data, if we want to succeed. The stone is in the camp of the Minister of Justice. We need to be able to access this data to be effective.
This text, which has been revised, also emphasizes cyber security with half of the envelope. Also, is there an emergency?
It’s urgent. I believe it was the minister himself who said that we are abysmally behind. This abyssal delay is seen in the services where we do not have the digital tools, everything related to telephone interceptions. There is a real modernization to be done because we need these tools to fight against the delinquency of tomorrow. For once, within the framework of this programming law that we have been asking for for years, we will be able to have the means, the time released to modernize our tools and hope that it can be done effectively.