For five weeks now, survivors and relatives of victims of the July 14 attack have been parading before the specially composed Assize Court of Paris with their suffering but also, often, a doubt that has never left them: the security system on Was the Promenade des Anglais enough? In recent days, at the helm, police officers on duty in the streets of Nice the evening when 86 people died there, hit by a truck, had themselves noted that no.
Thursday, October 20, the arrival of Christian Estrosi, on the initiative of an association of victims, had filled the courtroom. The explanations of the mayor of Nice aroused such expectation that, in the morning, the president of the court, Laurent Raviot, had to recall that a judicial investigation on this subject was in progress elsewhere, and that it was not the subject of his hearing: “This trial is not the trial of the authorities. This is not Mr. Estrosi’s trial. We are not in charge of instructing a lawsuit for the responsibility of the city of Nice. » In the afternoon, however, that is what we witnessed, and President Raviot himself asked the annoying questions.
“Don’t you think, in retrospect, that something may have been missing in the vigilance of the public authorities, national or municipal, with regard to the organization of the security system? “ “Wasn’t there a form of relaxation after Euro 2016, which ended four days earlier? “How was Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel able to make ten trips on the Promenade des Anglais with a vehicle of this tonnage in the previous days without being checked? “Given the configuration of the premises, how can one explain that the risk of intrusion by a large vehicle was not taken into consideration? »
Incomplete, imprecise and tense debate
“A posteriori, we can always wonder why we hadn’t imagined what was then unthinkable”, pleaded Christian Estrosi, who knew he was expected on two specific issues. The first: why, in the city with the most video surveillance in France – 1,836 cameras at the time, including 21 on the “prom” –, were the locations of the terrorist not perceived? “There are 108,000 vehicles a day in the west-east direction on the Promenade des Anglais, and 70,000 in the east-west direction. The recurrence of these passages could not be detected by the human eye. It would have been necessary to have recourse to artificial intelligence, to algorithms which are still forbidden to us today.replied the mayor of Nice, an ardent promoter of facial recognition and that of license plates.
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