Secure security
The Minister of the Interior was questioned in the Senate on Tuesday evening on the difficulties of the organizers of the 2024 Olympic Games to find the 22,000 private agents necessary to secure the event.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, cannot say whether it will be necessary to resort to the army to secure the Paris Olympics and pointed to the Senate on Tuesday evening “the important problem” hosting all public and private security forces.
Questioned during the debate on the Olympic bill by the centrist senator Laurent Lafon on the fact of knowing “when the scenario of the use of the army will be officially announced” to supplant a lack of long-time private security agents, a hypothesis that has been circulating widely behind the scenes for several weeks, Gérald Darmanin explained that it would be necessary to wait “February or March” to know more.
“We will see what we can do”
“At the beginning of next month we will know more” because the organizing committee of the Olympics (Cojo) is about to start “to strip” calls for tenders issued to companies. Then, “If at the end of the ends of the ends, a certain number of people are missing, we will see what we can do. But we believe that a large country like France is capable of responding to this private security issue. he assured.
Of the 22,000 agents needed to secure the competition sites, the responsibility of the Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (Cojo), “We have 11,000 to 12,000 who meet the criteria, we have made good progress”. “There is also the price that the Cojo will put”, he said again. Faced with this shortage scenario, the Court of Auditors recently recalled that it is up to the Organizing Committee to pay the State if the army were to be mobilized.
The distribution of public and private security police forces was the subject of the signing of a security protocol between the State and the organizers of the Games, a document which is currently being updated. An appendix is provided for the specific question of the opening ceremony on the Seine. In addition to the Covid crisis, and poor working conditions and salaries, the five-year residence permit criterion imposed by the 2021 global security law has further dried up the pool of agents.
“It will depend on the technological means”as the possibility of using body scanners included in the law, but also of all the security forces. «Will Paris have its 2,000 municipal police officers? next July?launched the minister, in a spade towards the mayor of the capital Anne Hidalgo.
Furthermore, he “we will have to accommodate in Paris and its inner suburbs 35,000 to 40,000 police and gendarmes and a few thousand private security agents who are not Parisians”, he also added. The question “Where are they staying” is a “first very important issue we are working on”.