Barely two days after the riots of October 17, several questions arise. Have the police been overwhelmed? Was the strong presence of rioters and looters in many cities in France poorly anticipated? And what do those first concerned, the police, think? Franceinfo was able to speak with several of them, of different ranks and operating across the four corners of France.
A CRS recounts all the hours spent on Saturday, in Lyon, facing the thugs. The latter has 29 years of law enforcement behind him. This CRS has experienced the Yellow Vests, the protest against pension reform, and more recently, the high school movement. He admits to having never seen this during the weekend of October 17, one "of the most complicated days that I have experienced in my work." were coming back. It was super complicated,” explains the Lyon CRS.
“We found ourselves a little abandoned”
An unprecedented surge of violence, and above all very long lasting, which began early on Saturday morning. At one point, says Patrice, he thought he wasn't going to make it: "The system was undersized, I think we didn't understand the scale of these gatherings, there was quite a shortage of staff," he explains. It's the first time where, really, I felt fear, telling myself we're not going to make it. They were virulent, they came into contact, and we didn't have too many resources and we couldn't get reinforcements, so we found ourselves a little abandoned and we did what we could."
This CRS spent many minutes without ammunition, without tear gas grenades. His testimony is far from isolated, several other police officers confide that they were also overwhelmed by the events. It is in particular high-ranking officers who say this behind the scenes. One of them, police director in a department, admits anonymously that “we were undersized for urban guerrilla warfare”. He even adds that “the multiplicity of groups of rioters overwhelmed us”.
This same officer adds, however, that he had “reinforcements from the gendarmerie. We were able to protect all the institutional buildings despite a few broken windows at the town hall." And he adds, "everyone was on the ground including myself because there were so many homes."
“It was the Paris Commune combined with Black Friday”
Another departmental director affirms that this policing was the most violent he had experienced. According to him, the police system was "formatted for a major demonstration but an insufficient system to prevent looting, particularly in connection with the traditional mode of action of the yellow vests". He also denounces "the goodwill of a large number of peaceful demonstrators for the perpetrators of serious violence and looting which they witnessed live". This departmental police boss explains that in the department's capital "the coexistence of a black bloc corresponded to around 10% of the demonstrators but with 20% of young people from the city who very quickly adopted the behavior of looters of opportunity".
One figure shows this: in Paris a CRS company fired 3,000 tear gas grenades on Saturday. Normally this does not exceed a hundred. A third very senior officer even considers himself lucky that the CRS did not panic. A police officer concluded that “it was the Paris Commune combined with Black Friday”.
These scenes of looting also shocked these police officers, although they are used to maintaining order, particularly in the face of 30,000 looters in Marseille. Or in Lyon, where there were also so many of them that even the looters who were caught did not all end up in police custody, as Patrice recounts who arrested some of them: "We arrested individuals who had looted but who were released, due to a lack of people who could take them and take them into custody. For these individuals, we took the identities and they were released, we seized the goods and that's it."
Justice also had to reorganize very quickly to avoid being overwhelmed. Faced with arrests showing record numbers, in Paris, for example, the prosecution had to relocate dozens of police custody to other departments. Many of them are still in progress.
