A change of tone. For its annual report published on Tuesday, November 19 and dedicated to the year 2023, marked by the mobilization against the pension reform and the riots after the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old girl shot dead by the police in Nanterre, the General Inspection of the National Police (IGPN) is increasingly less austere. Inflections that suggest the growing influence of Agnès Thibault-Lecuivre, the first magistrate to direct the “police police”, arriving in 2022, on the communication of an institution until now accustomed to working in almost monastic silence.
Instead of the usual linear summaries, the report opens in the form of an alphabet book. In the letter “comments that are equivalent to wooden language”. “Xyloglotte, a word in French that we do not adopt as ours in the IGPN! »the report states. To reinforce this statement, the document dedicates a new space to the criticisms made against the institution, such as suspicions “bias in favor of the police” from the general public and accusations of “excessive severity (…) towards the police officers involved” very widespread among police officers.
To respond to this, the IGPN wants to carry out educational work, remembering the fundamental principles on which its work is based: judicial investigations under the direction of a magistrate, independent administrative investigations, absence of sanctioning power… After the theory, The argument makes the impasse on some practical realities that constitute the weak points of the inspection: the lack of personnel, the possible influence on the career development of the inspectors or even the internal audits ordered by the political power.
5,263 encirclement grenades in 2023
However, the place given to these topics contrasts with the habits of an institution not very prone to self-criticism. The previous director, police commissioner Brigitte Jullien, was content to evacuate in one sentence. “ [des] attacks and [des] criticism, often unjustified »in the prologue of its latest annual report, that of 2021.
Parallel to this renewed communication, the annual report presents in a more traditional way the main data on the IGPN’s activity, particularly in terms of monitoring the use of weapons. As for encirclement grenades, a weapon “probably causes more or less serious bodily harm”, According to the IGPN, 5,263 uses were registered in 2023, more than double the previous year. Almost half of them (2,506 grenades) were used in just nine days during the summer riots, and another quarter was spent on protests against pension reform.
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