“All our support services, whether preventive medicine or psychologists, are undersized”, reacts on Saturday February 5 on franceinfo Jean-Christophe Couvy, national secretary SGP Police FO Unit after the meeting the day before with Gérald Darmanin on the subject of suicides in the police. The Minister of the Interior announced the recruitment of around twenty psychologists in the most difficult places of the national police. Since January 1, twelve police officers have taken their own lives. “It’s going to be a long job”according to Jean-Christophe Couvy.
franceinfo: Do you have the feeling that you were really heard, understood, and that we are going to seriously help you on this subject?
Jean-Christophe Couvy: We already have confirmation that Place Beauvau is not Hogwarts [un pensionnat pour jeunes sorcières et sorciers, dans l’univers de Harry Potter]. With a wave of a magic wand, you can’t change things. We explained where our feelings about the discomfort of the police came from. We know it’s going to be a long job. But we don’t have the impression either that we have a managerial revolution. We see that there is progress, things are trying to move a little bit. It’s not what we expect either. We are waiting to find this family spirit that represents the police. The police, for years, have been sclerotic. It was the cipher race. There are still performance results allowances.
“We see a police force which normally is a public service and which now becomes an object of performance and production.”
Jean-Christophe Couvy, National Secretary SGP Police FO Unitat franceinfo
Regarding the concrete changes, which you have been promised, there is first of all a mission from the General Inspectorate of Administration, vigilance instructions, support letters, but also 20 more psychologists for the operational psychological support, so that will make 120 psychologists for 145,000 police officers. What do you think ?
The ratio is low. You can clearly see that it is undersized. All our support services, whether preventive medicine or psychologists, are undersized compared to the number that we are. The police, every day, accumulate small traumas and, at some point, there is too much trauma that makes us act out. There are also all the burnouts that we do not count because suicides are the apparent part of the police’s discomfort. You really have to work on the long term and go into the material. In the background.
Another system put in place is that of sentries. Police officers who are trained to spot “weak signals”. The objective is 2,000 sentinels by the end of 2022. We are not there at all for the moment. There are about forty people on an experimental basis. That’s it ?
Of course, it’s experimental. We would like 2,000, but we would need almost 20,000. We must draw inspiration from the models in Israel or Quebec, for example. These are police officers who are trained. But be careful, we are not going to do e-learning [enseignement à distance]. It must be professionals who train us to detect weak signals. So all of that takes time. We started the machine and it’s in progress. It’s going to be a long job. I think of all those bereaved families every year. We recruited 10,000 police officers during the last five-year term. But how many will commit suicide? Do the young people who join the police know that they unfortunately have a chance of one day committing suicide because of the job? So things have to change. This paradigm needs to be changed. We need to rediscover this family spirit, of cohesion.