Four hundred and forty-one police officers and gendarmes injured during the single day of Thursday March 23, on the occasion of the ninth day of interprofessional mobilization against the pension reform: Friday morning, the day after clashes without equivalent since the demonstrations of “yellow vests”, the Minister of the Interior admitted a balance sheet “really difficult” on the set of CNews, reporting on “1,500 black blocks came to break the cop” in Paris. Although the capital, with 105 officials affected, concentrated nearly a quarter of the injured workforce, the police were seriously disrupted in several provincial towns, as evidenced by the “Seventh” viewed by The world.
In these march diaries, each CRS unit describes the progress of law enforcement operations, down to the minute, and lists not only the number of wounded in its ranks, but also the number of ammunition fired. All these documents describe a very degraded situation, marked by continual clashes immediately after the dispersal of the official processions – and, sometimes, during the progression of the demonstrators.
The report of the CRS 22 of Périgueux, in Nantes, illustrates the violence of the clashes between the forces of order and, estimates the document, eight hundred individuals belonging to the movement of« ultragauche » – including two hundred black blocks. He also explains the heavy toll suffered by this unit: thirty bruised and injured, eight of whom were transported to the Hôtel-Dieu University Hospital, one of them having to undergo emergency surgery for an open wound in his hand.
Dams, trash cans, mortars
Thursday, shortly before noon, and while the police have been deployed in Nantes for less than two hours, a “risk group” begins to attack them. Mobile and organized, the rioters multiplied the throwing of projectiles, roadblocks and the burning of garbage cans or pallets, the firing of fireworks and the throwing of at least one Molotov cocktail. An hour later, as the incidents continued, the CRS found themselves in serious difficulty: they had to obey the order to withdraw to a very unfavorable position near the Turenne wharf, where demonstrators, positioned above, attack them under a “deluge of projectiles”.
“Cornered”the unit must fire grenades at a very short distance to hope to get free, then finds itself forced to“operate withdrawal” in the parking lot of the CHU, a new position “very unfavourable” where she is still taken to task before managing to extract herself from the trap. Without stopping, the clashes will continue for long hours, until the beginning of the evening, when the leaders of the CRS 22 draw up the heavy toll.
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