2023-06-29 06:00:21
Emmanuel Macron, in Marseille, June 28, 2023. LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP
Thursday, June 29, after a second night of explosion of fireworks mortars, car fires and anger that set Nanterre, as well as several cities in France, Emmanuel Macron acts on the crisis. The Head of State convened an interministerial crisis unit, which was to be held at 8 a.m. Place Beauvau, to take stock of the violence that took place during the night.
The day before, the executive raised the tone. A crime « inexplicable » et « inexcusable »describes the Head of State, Emmanuel Macron, in front of the cameras from Marseille, expressing “the emotion of the whole nation”. Tuesday, at 8:30 a.m., Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager, was killed in Nanterre at close range by a police officer during a traffic check. The scene, captured on a smartphone by a passerby, has been circulating for twenty-four hours on social networks, undermining the version of the police according to which the young man at the wheel would have run into the police.
“Nothing, nothing, justifies the death of a young person”adds the Head of State, wishing that “justice passes” with “speed”. Anxious not to offend the security forces, Emmanuel Macron also expresses his support for the police and the gendarmes, “which only serve one thing, it is the laws of the Republic (…)within an ethical framework that is defined and must be respected”. At the same time, its Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, evokes a “absolute demand for truth”before designating a shot “obviously not in accordance with the rules of engagement”.
Read also: Death of Nahel in Nanterre: night of riots and destruction in the major cities of France
It was enough to arouse the ire of the police unions, which insist on ” the presumption of innocence ” of the policeman who fired the shot, a principle which “is not an option but the law”, according to Unit-SGP-Police. Uncomfortable, the power had been looking for twenty-four hours how to condemn the homicide without bringing shame on the police. Tuesday, questioned in the National Assembly, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, recognized ” a drama ” but called for respect ” the presumption of innocence “ of the policeman, adding that “in very many cases, police and gendarmes have died from refusing to comply”.
Inflection of government discourse
It is, in fact, the broadcast of the filmed sequence, which has gone viral, which has forced the authorities to revise a narrative that has been running for two years, by the multiplication of fatal shots after refusals to comply. This argument makes police officers deliberate and systematic targets of drivers seeking to evade a traffic control. As of Tuesday morning, the video defused this usual version, snippets of which had been distilled without excessive precaution by certain media evoking a driver who “dark” on a policeman placed ” in the front [du véhicule] to stop it”.
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