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PARIS – Thousands of police officers gathered in Paris on Wednesday to call for tougher sentences for those convicted of attacking police officers. They were joined by citizens and right wing politicians, but also, unusually, by left wing leaders.
Spotted among the protests in the capital were Socialist leader Olivier Faure, the green leader Yannick Jadot, and the communist leader Fabien Roussel. Notably absent was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of the far-left France Unbowed party.
While left-wing leaders are no strangers to political marches, their presence at a police protest was notable.
“We need to reconcile the French with police officers,” said Faure. “Everybody must understand today that they face a lot of difficulties.”
“A police officer is not just a uniform, it’s someone with a family, with a life. If you think they are machines then you haven’t understood anything. Their vocation is to protect their country,” he said.
Politicians joined police officers in paying homage to officers killed or wounded in recent operations. One officer was shot during a drugs check in Avignon this month, and a police employee was fatally stabbed by a radicalized criminal in Rambouillet last month.
Ahead of next year’s presidential election, security is one of the top issues among voters.
President Emmanuel Macron has made the fight against crime a priority for his government with new security legislation and a promise to recruit an extra 10,000 officers.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin was at the protest “to support the police like all the French,” he said.
‘Go home safely’
The protest was an opportunity for left-wingers to acknowledge that the fight against crime was a priority for their voters, too, in particular for blue-collar workers, many of whom have deserted them for the far right National Rally.
“If we aren’t interested in the problems that affect the working classes, we should not be surprised if the working classes are not interested in us,” Communist Party spokesperson Ian Brossat told Playbook Paris.
“The Communist party has never been a libertarian party, it’s the least you can say,” he said. “We need to be clear on this topic, or else people won’t listen to us. At the very least people should be able to go home safely.”
Even for the greens, traditionally a more metropolitan movement, it was an opportunity to take the spotlight away from the political right.
“I refuse to let the police be manipulated by the far right and by the government,” Jadot said on TV channel France 2.
But left-wingers’ support for the police exposes disagreements on how to tackle crime, particularly police demands for mandatory jail sentences for those who attack the police.
“I don’t agree with a number of [police] demands, and this atmosphere of hitting, hitting, hitting on the justice system,” said Jadot, adding that police officers need better training and poor neighborhoods more investment.
The protest march has also exposed divisions within the left between those taking part and those who did not. Jadot himself wrong-footed his own party, which had earlier issued a press release saying the party regretted the attempts to politicize the march.
Rising violence
According to police unions, 35,000 protesters took part in the march to honour those killed on duty. “The police are paid to protect, not to die,” was one of the slogans at the protest.
Violence against the police has risen steadily in the past 20 years. The number of police officers wounded in operations has increased by 70 percent since 2004, reaching 6,760 in 2019, according to interior ministry figures.
Critics say this rise has come hand in hand with an increase in police brutality, in particular during violent clashes around the Yellow Vest movement in 2018 and 2019.
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