Paris urgently needs to improve its security if it wants to avoid serious damage to the image of the city and the country in the 2024 Olympic Games. President Emmanuel Macron has understood that the problem is serious and that is why he has instructed the Government to put A special plan is underway.
In an interview with the newspaper Le Parisien, the most popular in the capital, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, yesterday confirmed the will to "intensify the fight against crime like never before." To do this, the State will create a thousand additional police positions in Paris over the next five years, 500 of them before the Games. The City Council will also be helped to raise the number of agents of the newly created municipal police to 2,500 – from the current 400.
Darmanin's announcements came just two days after a shooting at a hookah bar in Paris's 11th arrondissement left one dead and four wounded. By all indications, it was a settling of scores. Such episodes are becoming more frequent.
Parallel to the interview with the Minister of the Interior, the change at the head of the Parisian police prefecture was made official. The controversial Didier Lallement left, with a very harsh and authoritarian mood, and Laurent Núñez, former number two of the Ministry of the Interior and former coordinator of the secret services and the fight against terrorism, was appointed. Núñez is a firm man but more open to dialogue. His long resume includes having been prefect of the Marseille region, a city with a well-established tradition of underworld and banditry.
Any resident of Paris or tourist knows that it is an unsafe city. Warnings about the presence of pickpockets are constant in the subway. But, in addition, there are particular phenomena such as the robbery of luxury watch wearers in the middle of the street –a scourge mentioned by Darmanin–, the robbery of jewelers or the endemic problem of the crack trade and its consumers.
The public safety and public order deficit was cruelly exposed, in the eyes of the whole world, in the incidents outside the stadium before and after the Champions League soccer final on May 28. To the shame of the mismanagement, the police mess and the degraded environment of the suburbs of Paris was added a self-exculpatory official version that was hardly credible, even for the French Parliament itself.
The 2024 Games pose huge challenges. The largest of these is the planned inaugural parade, along the Seine, with delegations crossing the river in boats and 600,000 spectators on both banks and on the bridges, most of which are freely accessible to the public. They want to do something never seen before, although guaranteeing safety in these conditions is now a nightmare for the organizers. Protecting the expected 14,000 athletes and delegations from more than 200 countries, as well as some 25,000 accredited journalists, involves formidable logistics and two years of non-stop preparation.
According to Le Monde, the 2024 Games, which will take place between July 26 and August 11 of that year, will be "the last breath of oxygen" of Macron's second term, which is very politically and economically agitated. If the sporting event is a success, it will be a positive legacy for the president in France and in the world. Otherwise, his inheritance will suffer noticeable damage. They are also decisive for the mayor of Paris, the socialist Anne Hidalgo, who has been left very shaken after her catastrophic results in the last presidential elections. For Minister Darmanin, one of the candidates to succeed Macron, the Games can be a springboard or a political pit.
