Right in his boots. The former Paris police chief, whose management of order maintenance was highly questioned during the yellow vests, reviews his experience. Now Secretary General of the Sea, Didier Lallement assumes his doctrine that has resulted in dozens of wounded in the ranks of the protesters.
“There were no deaths in Paris during the crisis. We were close to opening fire but, thanks to the courage of the policemen, that did not happen. The day we have to open fire, we will enter another dimension. could happen one day”, advances the sexagenarian in a long interview with Opinion.
“Bitterness and roughness” of the yellow vests
The high position was appointed by Emmanuel Macron in December 2018, after Act 3 of the Yellow Vests that had caused serious damage on the Champs-Elysées and under the Arc de Triomphe. His mandate then is clear: get in touch with the protesters to prevent harm, even if that means assuming violent confrontations.
“Your hand shouldn’t shake,” asked Christophe Castaner, then Minister of the Interior. Didier Lallement never wavered. Stop looking provocative.
The scene, in November 2019 at the Place d’Italie, the day after a hectic demonstration, where he meets a woman in yellow vests, is symptomatic of this posture.
“We’re not on the same side, ma’am!” He blurts out then.
Later he will recognize “an awkwardness”. “The movement of the yellow vests is an illustration of the lack of political outlets for social struggles (…). Its participants, who also systematically eliminated their leaders, were returned to their bitterness and acrimony,” he judges however with the newspaper The former head of the Parisian police.
No police capable of bringing “reason”
At the beginning of September, a judge began to investigate the Nassés yellow vests episode in Paris in 2019, when Didier Lallement was in charge of the police headquarters. Other judicial information also indicates him for “arbitrary detention.”
More broadly, the figure of Didier Lallement has crystallized in recent years the tensions linked to several cases of police violence, in particular during the beating of black producer Michel Zecler in his Paris studio by a police squad.
“In this case, there was no superior officer capable of restoring calm and reason. At the Paris police headquarters, between 60% and 80% of the policemen who leave school are affected each year, and they are still five to six years old, ”he tries. to justify the former head of the Paris police headquarters who handled this case.
The controversies that followed made him the one shot down by the left, which multiplied the calls for his resignation. If the RN and the right have long supported him, the situation changed after the Stade de France fiasco last May.
The Stade de France, “not brilliant”
The Champions League final, which pitted Liverpool against Real Madrid, was then marked by excesses, including crowd movements, tear gas by police and attacks on fans. If the prefect of police initially defended the “very good progress” of the operations in a report, his tone had changed before the Senate investigation commission, acknowledging “a failure”.
“In terms of security we got away with it but, it is true, it was not brilliant. However, the trauma was collective, tonight was experienced as a national humiliation, our flag could not stay in office and I assumed my responsibilities. “, now justifies the former director of the Parisian police.
Undocumented immigrants must “be saints” so as not to “become criminals”
In fact, long before this event, the sixty-year-old had already expressed his desire to leave the police headquarters to return to the Court of Auditors, where he had been appointed in 2014, before retiring definitively.
Finally, Didier Lallement returns to the statements of Gérald Darmanin, his former minister, who revealed the general lines of his future immigration bill. “Some of the foreigners in the big cities commit most of the criminal acts,” the Beauvau tenant judged on the microphone of BFMTV last week.
“The reality is that, in order not to become a criminal after arriving in France in chaotic situations, you have to be a saint. People arrive in the territory, are not deported to the border for various reasons, and do not have the right to work. “, deciphers the former prefect of police.
Before adding: “What option do they have left? Work on the black market? Subsist thanks to other illegal resources? Man is neither naturally good nor naturally bad. We are creating the conditions for a reality.”
At the General Secretariat for the Sea, Didier Lallement now exercises “a mission of control, evaluation and forecasting” in terms of maritime policy.
Source: BFM TV
