Already the numbers. There were not in Poitiers “between 400 to 600 people” as Minister Bruno Retailleau had first announced but “40 to 60 people” during the brawl, which broke out after a shooting in front of a restaurant in the city. Invited on France Bleu Poitou this Monday, November 4, the mayor of Poitiers, Léonore Moncond, demanded accountability from the minister. A 15-year-old boy died and four others were injured.
“The minister made a mistake and when we speak publicly and even more so the word of a government, we must be extremely careful about the information we rely on,” pointed out the mayor, angry for her city and its inhabitants. “The event was tragic enough in itself, there was no need to add to it with fights, gangs and that in no way corresponded to the reality of the neighborhood, to the reality of our city”.
“The 'narcoracailles' no longer have limits (…) These shootings are not happening in South America, they are happening in Rennes, in Poitiers (…). We are at a tipping point,” the Minister of the Interior exclaimed in the morning on BFMTV/RMC. Words that served a “instrumentalization of the image of a neighborhood and the image of our city, in the service of an alarmist, populist discourse, and this is extremely serious”denounced the elected official, at the microphone of France Bleu.
“Based on fear”
“A young person, because he lives in a neighborhood, is necessarily guilty,” regrets the elected official. This is absolutely not the case, he had done nothing, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. added the councilor, referring to the young teenager killed during the shooting. Léonore Moncond to call on the minister to reestablish the truth, to correct the comments he made on the morning of the shooting and which “de facto contribute to fueling the amalgams between the youth of the neighborhoods as a whole and the traffickers. This is unacceptable.” “It has fueled an extremely security policy discourse which is based on fear, to scare people”,
Furthermore, the mayor refutes the term “Mexicanization”, used by the same man: « Mexicanisation of society, this refers to a gangrenous society, where there is no longer a rule of law, with corrupt local elected officials, corrupt administration, which in no way corresponds to what we know in Poitiers”she argued.
