It all started with a simple football match.
Saturday May 28, the final of the Champions League, which sees the clubs of Liverpool and Real Madrid clash in Paris, quickly turns into a nightmare for certain English supporters. Thousands of spectators find themselves stranded outside the Stade de France, and when the tension rises, the police do not hesitate to take “muscular” measures, while security around the stadium is far from assured.
Soon, the case takes a political turn, the behavior of the police being questioned in particular by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who, a few days later, comments on the death of a woman killed by the police during a control (June 4, in Paris) speaking of “death penalty for failure to comply” and of “police that kill”. Enough to trigger a general debate on the behavior of the police in France. Discussions which, for the correspondent of the Temps in Paris, have a strong scent of deja-vu.
“Police behavior has always been a particularly bitter subject in France”, notes the Geneva newspaper, which recalls the existence of the slogan “CRS = SS” already in the 1960s, or even “the chase that sparked the 2005 suburban riots”. However, according to the French-language daily, the crisis of “yellow vests” has further exacerbated this debate, so much so that today “the subject of ‘police violence’ has become one of the main points of cleavage in the political landscape”.
Thus, defenders and defenders of the forces of order regularly oppose each other on subjects as diverse as “the supervision of demonstrations and the repression of excesses, racial profiling and other discrimination, as well as accidents (or ‘blunders’ depending on the political side) such as that of this weekend in Paris”.
An opposition that started again following the incidents at the Stade de France, the death of a woman during a vehicle check, but also after the broadcast of images showing people being gassed for trying to climb in a bus, Gare de l’Est, in Paris.
It’s history repeating itself, according to Time, who speaks of a “endless debate which has no chance of leading to decisions”, and which describes reactions to events dictated exclusively by the political positioning of those who speak out:
“On the left, we denounce ‘systemic police violence’. On the right, we defend the police against all odds. Everyone sticks to their positions, as if the subject were more ideological than ethical or practical.”
A small theater therefore, which, during an election campaign, is even more easily supplied, but which does not “leads to no response. And even less on shares.” In short, the French debate on ‘police violence’ is a “dead end”, summarizes the Geneva daily in its title.