Judicial police reform: Gérald Darmanin in front of an unexpected sling

After having delayed reaffirming his determination to preserve the independence of judicial police investigators, placed under the authority of the magistrates, the Minister of the Interior is confronted with an unprecedented crisis.

by

Analysis. Police rallies before police stations and courts, press releases, stands: Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin would have gladly passed from the Fronde movement aroused by his police reform project. “The most ambitious for forty years,” he likes to repeat.

This total overhaul of police services in France is based on the creation of departmental directorates of the national police, which aim to end the operating mode of current organ pipes. So far, whatever their establishment in the provinces, the police (judicial police, borders, public security, intelligence) only reported their respective central directions. To decompartmentalize police action, a single police director in each department would now be responsible for overseeing all services for the benefit of a global vision, of increased efficiency.

There is no shortage of arguments in support of such a reform. Faced with the members of the Senate Law Commission on September 28, then before their counterparts of the National Assembly on October 12, the director general of the national police, Frédéric Veaux, explained the justifications, hardly refutable: Doublons, absurd conventions signed between police services to distribute the surveys according to sometimes not very readable criteria have led the police to be “unfortunately less effective than it could be in the past”.

To rationalize, it would therefore be necessary to unify. In this scheme, investigators from the judicial police, competent for great crime affairs, would merge with those of public security, responsible for mass litigation generated by small delinquency. This is precisely where the rub. The vast majority of “pjists”, which are now associated with magistrates and lawyers, fear to see their field of intervention circumscribed to the narrow limits of a department, when organized crime is played out of national borders.

They also accuse the ministry of seeking to affect them primarily at the processing of small delinquency files to absorb the stock of suffering procedures: no less than 1.5 million. In other words, they see behind Darmanin’s plan for his intention to want to shape the police of tomorrow for the benefit of purely political ambitions, served by better figures for the delinquency of delinquency.

You have 56.42% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.

/Media reports.