“At the whistle, you empty your magazine!“, launches Major Éric Palais, before the detonations echo in the shooting range of the Orleans police station. Jules, 23, has just pulled the trigger. The young man is one of the 1,500 reservists who are to be recruited this year, as part of a major campaign aimed at civil society.
Far from weapons and security, Jules comes from a medical background, he is a caregiver in an intensive care unit: “This is why I chose the police, there is this human side, population. I had never dared to take the plunge before, I had been thinking about it for a while, but when I heard about the reserve I thought it was an opportunity to try. Finally, here I am.”
The young man is at his third week of training out of four. After ten shooting sessions already in July, he has just spent three months without touching a weapon. The return to the stand is done first by empty manipulations, then different exercises with real ammunition, then even the notch above: with obstacles and covering his teammate. “I don’t think they lost too much compared to what we could expect.” watch the major, they only had 15 days of training. They have remained in control of their weapon and they have mastered handling and shooting quite well, so we can gradually make the exercises more complex..”
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Jules takes stock in front of the target. “For a first two [coéquipiers]it’s good“, comments the major. The future reservist is then all smiles and remembers his first shots, three months earlier: “It was the first time we held a weapon, I was very apprehensive. I thought to myself, ‘Am I going to be able to use it? Am I going to be in the right safety rules? The trainers are very pedagogical and have succeeded, for the most part, in making us overcome our fears.“
“Students or people who have never had contact with a weapon were shaking from the start. It is unacceptable, it is not possible.”
Major Éric Palais, one of the trainersFrance Info
The fear of holding a weapon in one’s hands makes it possible to sort it out. A first skimming to avoid future accidents on the ground. “It is not possible to be outside, on an intervention, where you are afraid of your weapon and where the colleagues must pay attention to you, and at the same time ensure the safety of the intervention”, described Eric Palais. Among the reserves present with Jules, a quarter were eliminated due to the shooting.
Reinforcing the ranks of the police with reservists from civil society aims to improve the image of law enforcement among the population. “The reserve solution will allow us to get closer to the population, to take people from the population, who are already working, who are already part of it. We are looking to recruit people between the ages of 18 and 35, to have greater proximity to young people.“explains Thierry Guiguet-Doron, departmental director of public security in Loiret.
The ambition is to double the presence of “blue” in contact with the population by 2030. A way of catching up with the police behind the gendarmerie, which already has a reserve of nearly 40,000 members. But will the reservists be called upon to take over from the incumbents? And if so, for what types of missions Trade unions are concerned.
“These people will be confronted with the violence that can be encountered in society. From preventive police, we can switch to repressive police in a few minutes”
Thierry Clair, Deputy Secretary General of the UNSA PoliceFrance Info
They point to assistant police trained in just four months, and now reservist police trained in four weeks. “There is the fear that these people will be used as active personnel, like police officers, and that they will be diverted from their support mission“, warns Thierry Clair, deputy secretary general of the UNSA Police.
The trade unionist recalls the difference in training time between a peacekeeper and a reservist: “A police officer is trained for twelve months, a person from the operational reserve will have four weeks’ training, so it’s not the same thing, it’s not the same missions, not the same status.”
Two different paths, and yet situations to be dealt with which are likely to be similar. “These people will be confronted with the lack of respect shown to our colleagues. This is also the difficulty of the job“, adds Tyesterday Clair. And among the most critical situations that potentially await reservists are refusals to comply, which are increasing, more than 26,000 last year. Already so feared by seasoned starters, they have been the source of an increase in fatal shots since the start of the year.