After a week of shocking scenes of police violence in Paris, the future of the controversial and until now seemingly immovable head of law and order in the capital, Paris police prefect Didier Lallement, appears finally in the balance.
The brutal evacuation of migrants from their makeshift camp of tents on the Place de la République in central Paris on November 23rd, filmed and circulated at length on traditional and social media, when activists and at least one journalist were, along with migrants, victims of police violence, was met with widespread outrage and even prompted hardline interior minister Gérald Darmanin to describe the events as “shocking”.
“Journalists beaten up, refugees chased away with baton blows, elected political representatives encircled,” wrote EELV Green party Paris deputy-mayor David Belliard in an angry Twitter post following the events that night. “In face of misery, this unleashing of violence is a disgrace. The Paris police prefect must be called to account.”
The police action that Monday engaged the personal responsibility of Lallement, 64, already the target of fierce criticism, above all from the Left, for his past tough-handed policing strategy towards demonstrations in the capital, and his insensitive public declarations, while his taste for pomp and full regalia has served to accentuate an image of pomposity. While tipped for the sack on several occasions since his appointment 20 months ago, he has survived thanks to direct support from the presidential office.
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Green party senator Bernard Jomier was among politicians publicly calling for Lallement’s dismissal last week, while radical-left Member of Parliament (MP) Alexis Corbière, speaking on TV channel LCI commented: “If brutality was used, it’s because there were instructions. I call for the resignation of the prefect, Mr Didier Lallement.” There were similar reactions even from among MPs in President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling LREM party, a number of whom have denounced the violence of the police. One, speaking to Mediapart on condition his name was withheld, said Lallement’s dismissal was “the only possible response”.
The Paris public prosecution services have opened two preliminary investigations into specific cases of police violence last Monday night, one targeting a journalist and the other towards a migrant. Meanwhile, the office of the official rights ombudsman announced it had opened its own inquiry into the events as part of its “mission to ensure the respect of the fundamental rights of foreigners and the deontology of the security forces”.
Forty-eight hours after the scenes on the Place de la République, video images emerged in public of a separate incident in which a black music producer, Michel Zecler, was the victim of a brutal, apparently unprovoked, criminal attack by several police officers at his Paris recording studio. The images, revealed by French website Loopsider, came from CCTV footage and videos recorded by neighbours during the evening of November 21st. He had been followed into the building by three officers who assaulted him with punches and baton blows, while another threw a teargas grenade into the studio after they retreated, before the attack continued outside.
The events of November 21st and 23rd were a severe embarrassment for the government as it is presenting draft legislation through parliament, a bill of “Global security”, to increase police and surveillance powers, and which notably includes an article which would ban the taking and dissemination of images of on-duty police if these are deemed to violate “the physical and mental integrity” of the officers concerned. The circulated images of last week’s incidents of brutality could well have been banned under the proposed law.
Already this July, separate articles in French weeklies Le Point and Le Canard enchaîné reported that Prime Minister Jean Castex had called for Lallement to be “evicted”. Days later, interior minister Gérald Darmanin denied the rumours, telling French news agency AFP that, “there is no difficulty with the Paris police prefect”. In September, Darmanin published his ministry’s “new national plan on law and order”, which defines strategy for policing demonstrations, and which was based in part on Lallement’s management of policing of the “Yellow Vest” protests in Paris.
But it was precisely the policing tactics in those demonstrations – such as head-on physical confrontation of demonstrators, the deployment of rapid intervention police teams on motorbikes, introduced by Lallement in March last year, and the use of drones – which prompted recurrent criticism of the Paris police prefect. The motorbike brigade, called BRAV-M, have been used in other demonstrations than those by Yellow Vests, and in January this year caused injuries to several people during a union-led protest march against pension reforms.
Before his appointment as the capital’s police chief last March, Lallement was prefect, from late 2017, of the south-west Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, based in Bordeaux. His strategy there for policing demonstrations, and notably the Yellow Vest protests which began in November 2018, came in for sharp rebuke by an independent rights watchdog for the region, called the Girondin Observatory of Public Freedoms, which includes representatives from the League of human Rights, the Union of Lawyers of France (SAF) and Greenpeace. A 60-page report published by the observatory in April 2019 accused him of employing a police strategy of “intimidation” and the dangerous, improperly defined use of weapons. According to an in-depth profile of Lallement published by daily Le Monde in February this year, when he was appointed as prefect of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the then mayor of Bordeaux, former French prime minister Alain Juppé, exclaimed, “Well I never, apparently I’m being sent a Nazi?”
But it was as of his arrival in Paris, when he succeeded Michel Delpuech as police prefect, that Lallement’s reputation took on national importance with his controversial policing strategies. Under his orders, officers were instructed to physically engage with demonstrators and to employ a tactic of encircling them, more familiarly called “netting”, preventing the exit of those who sought to leave the scene. As Mediapart has previously reported, internal documents from senior officers of the gendarmerie and CRS riot police services complained of the prefect’s tactics (here, in French). These, one gendarmerie report noted, were “legally questionable and with potentially harmful political consequences”, and “contrary to the legislation and regulations in force”. The methods also prompted Polish MEPs, amid a tit-for-tat diplomatic spat between Warsaw and Paris, to denounce the police violence.
Several complaints have been lodged by Yellow Vest demonstrators against Lallement in person for organising police violence, including one filed by a man who lost use of an eye from a rubber bullet and which is now the subject of judicial investigation (at least more than a hundred demonstrators and bystanders received life-changing injuries from police rubber bullets and dispersion grenades).
In March this year, a demonstration in Paris by feminists was marked by police violence caught on video and denounced by witnesses present. The then interior minister, Christophe Castaner, announced he had requested a report from Lallement on the incidents, but the events became rapidly eclipsed in the public eye by the Covid-19 epidemic.
But the Paris police prefect has also caused outrage over his public comments. In early April this year, during the lockdown on public movement to contain the coronavirus epidemic, Lallement declared: “Those who are today hospitalised, those who are in intensive care, are those who, at the beginning of the lockdown, did not respect it. There is a very simple corelation.” The storm caused by his comment, when medical staff and politicians called for his dismissal, prompted him to issue an apology, as demanded by the then interior minister, the very same day. But it was an apology of sorts. “Beyond the inaccuracy, it is a mistake and I regret it,” Lallement said. “I know I have offended numerous people who have people close to them in intensive care, in hospital, or who recently lost dear ones.”
But once again, he survived the moment, supported by the executive although causing increasing unease among LREM parliamentarians. Then in June, when incidents of violence and racism by the police had become a major issue of debate in France, Lallement sent out a circular to all the staff of the Paris police prefecture, in which he wrote: “There is no race within the police, as there are also no racialised, or racist oppressors. There are public servants who are committed to liberty, equality and fraternity, and that on a daily basis!”
In July this year, several officers from a police intervention unit known as CSI 93, based in the Seine-Saint-Denis département (or county), a north Paris suburb and which comes the command of the Paris police prefecture, were placed under investigation over allegations of extorsion, theft, and possession of drugs. The scandal was such that Lallement announced the unit would be disbanded. But not only did that never happen, the Paris police prefect mobilised the unit during the second half of October to locally enforce the overnight curfew introduced, before the latest lockdown, to contain the Covid-19 epidemic.
The events of last week, however, may just prove a scandal too many for Didier Lallement.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version, with updating, by Graham Tearse