A note from the Terra Nova Foundation underlines the lack of anticipation in the training of police officials. And recommends more opening.
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How will the 8,500 police officers will be formed, including Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, announced recruitment over five years on September 6? Insufficiently, according to the Terra Nova foundation. In a note entitled “Recruitment and training, crucial issues for the quality of public security service”, the think tank draws up training of police officers still and always considered “as the parent who is too often poor in recent reforms” . Or, in clear language, a current device too “fragmented”, “little open to the outside” and suffering from a deficit of “coherence and coordination between gendarmerie and police”.
At the origins of evil, the clear cuts imposed by the general revision of public policies, decided in 2007, led to the abolition of more than 9,000 full -time equivalent jobs. Since then, accordion follows have followed one another in terms of recruitment. In 2012, there were 2,500 guardian students in initial training. They were 9,300 to be incorporated in 2016, after the attacks of November 13, 2015, then 6,200 in 2021. Logical consequence, the level of selectivity accused a clear drop. The rate of admission to the peacekeeper competition was multiplied by nine between 2014 and 2020, from 2 % to 18 %.
The pitfalls hold – no doubt – to the strategic decisions of an administration which struggles to reform in depth and the indecision of the political. But they are coupled with a certain sclerosis in learning the fundamentals of the profession, with a low -renovated training offer and still focused on operational intervention techniques, without redesigned the relationships between police and population. “The opening remains very limited in terms of training modules, trainers themselves, underlines Jacques de Maillard, report editor and researcher at the Center for Sociological Research on Law and Criminal Institutions. Even if there are innovations Interesting, change only exists on the margins. “Same observation for the law: no legal knowledge is required, a gap that does not make it possible to fill the teaching of matter in school, reduced to the congruent portion .
The generalist character of training and the recruitment of poorly diversified profiles promote “the coherence and unity of institutions” by allowing all the police to have a “common experience of the public road”. But, if the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, has promised to reserve four places from the police commissioner competition for polytechnicians, if the bill of orientation and programming of the Ministry of the Interior considers, without any other Precision, to expand the spectrum of recruitment, these measures remain much lower than the practices implemented within the gendarmerie, where “officers under supervision contract” to highly technical profiles are recruited to grades corresponding to their skills, for a period of seventeen.
These conclusions echo a report by the February Court of Auditors in which the failures in terms of initial and continuous training were notably reported, the latter rarely exceeding five days, all bodies combined.
Such elements do not exclusively constitute an administrative and technical analysis grid. They largely condition the methods of exercising a difficult profession, at binding times, to crucial missions.