One week after the preventive detention of a Marseille police officer (south of France), for allegedly assaulting a 22-year-old young man in early July, the French Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin, met with police unions. According to sources close to the minister, he “favorably welcomed [sus] proposals and asked the General Directorate of the National Police to study their operational and legal feasibility”.
The main demand of the organizations is “a modification of article 144 of the penal procedure code”, as he wrote in a brochure Unit-SGP, one of the main police unions in the neighboring country. By accepting that this law be examined, Gérald Darmanin would be committing himself in fact to “study the law to reconsider the provisional detention of a police officer in the act of duty”, according to the same Unité-SGP brochure.
The union also calls for the creation of a “specific status for the cops implicated or investigatedwith the purpose of avoid their preventive detention”, and eventually “courts and magistrates specialized” for cases involving police officers.
This proposal comes after the controversial declarations of Frederic CalvesDirector General of the French National Police, on Sunday, July 23, when he stated that a police officer “does not belong in preventive detention before his trial […] not even in case of error or serious misconduct”. The French Minister of the Interior endorsed these commentstelling BFMTV that Veaux “talked like a boss would to his policemen” and that he was “very proud that he was [su] co-worker”.
Speaking to France 2 television channel on Friday, the first secretary of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faurecalled for the resignation of Gérald Darmanin, who, he said, “defy the republic” by supporting Frédéric Veaux despite the “risk of sedition“. He also asked the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to “put order in his own house” because “there cannot be a State within the State”. In his opinion, “the independence of justicethe separation of powers and the equality of citizens Before the Law” are threatened by these types of comments.