unprecedented mobilization in Paris to protest against the project

To reassure. Explain. By dismissing Eric Arella, head of the judicial police (PJ) in twenty-one departments in the south of France, the Ministry of the Interior undoubtedly underestimated these two basic principles of crisis communication. And transformed an eminently technical question, which hardly fascinated the crowds, into a subject of opinion, with questions to the government, forums and press releases.

On Tuesday, October 11, 200 civil servants gathered in front of 36, rue du Bastion, headquarters of the Parisian PJ, in support of the protest movement of their colleagues in several provincial towns, and even though the Paris Police Prefecture does not is not affected by the current reform project. “We cannot say that this mobilization is unexpected, says Yann Bauzin, president of the National Association of the Judicial Police. The PJ spirit is precisely this permanent reactivity and this solidarity. It should come as no surprise to anyone, especially our hierarchy, that the PJ can react like this when its existence is threatened. » More surprising, on the other hand: in Paris, magistrates and lawyers joined the police rally. The National Conference of Attorneys General, for its part, called for a “suspension” of reform.

Certainly, the rebellion organized, Thursday, October 6, by 200 officials at the headquarters of the PJ in Marseilles during the visit of the director general of the national police (DGPN) Frédéric Veaux, who was to decline his reform project there, could hardly remain without answer. The broadcast on social networks of the video of this sequence, where the police stand, silent and with their arms crossed, facing Mr. Veaux, himself a figure of the PJ, turned out to be too viral, too devastating for Place Beauvau remains silent. But the express eviction of Eric Arella, a senior police officer highly regarded by his Marseille troops, acted as a powerful mobilization lever.

Method problem

For several months and the announcement of the creation of “departmental directorates of the national police”, the PJ fears losing its independence and the high level of technicality that it claims in the fight against organized crime, to be entrusted with more routine investigations, the resolution of which would contribute to reducing the voluminous stock of cases in progress . It fears, moreover, that its freedom of action will be limited to the borders of each department, when the most structured criminal groups are mobile and extend their ramifications across the territory and abroad.

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