Police numbers in Marseille decreased by 4.5% during Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. The fall is not dizzying, and the report from the Court of Auditors, made public on Sunday October 20, which reveals it is not even particularly biting. But these figures are enough to undermine several years of government communication, notably embodied by the former Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin.
Also read the portrait (2023): Article reserved for our subscribers Gérald Darmanin, taking care of the police
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In detail, the report notes “a clear deterioration in the number of police officers assigned to Marseille between 2016 and 2020”, since it went from 4,232 to 3,953 agents, all services combined (public security, judicial police, border police). In 2021, a few months after his arrival at Place Beauvau, Gérald Darmanin announced “300 more police officers” by 2023.
Three years later, the Court of Auditors actually noted the arrival of 436 peace guards, but noted that “these reinforcements (…) did not fill the departures » and that the shortage of staff remains high: with 4,064 agents, the number remains “ lower than that of 2017 ». She also recalls that many police officers were recruited as soon as they finished their training: ” THE [policiers] school leavers seek to leave the district as soon as possible, which suggests an employment pattern which risks deteriorating again from this year 2024.
“Significant reinforcements which are struggling to increase the numbers”
A customary traveler in the Marseille city, the former Minister of the Interior, now MP (Renaissance) for the North, presented another version of his assessment, on October 17, on X: “In 2020, Marseille had 2,210 field police officers. There were 2,799 of them when I left. There are therefore 589 net police positions that have been created for the people of Marseillais. »
For his calculation, the former top cop in France notably chose to exclude officers (− 15.5% between 2016 and 2023) and security assistants (− 61%), but above all, he includes the 380 agents of the four Republican Security Companies (CRS) mobilized in Marseille, which are not part of the Marseille workforce strictly speaking, and most of which are not recently “created” positions. For the Court of Auditors, “only the three CRS deployed [à Marseille]as well as the CRS 81, very regularly used, make it possible to show the population that the presence on the ground has been reinforced”even though “CRS units […] are intended to be projected across the entire territory.
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