I saw a clip which featured John Oliver bemoaning the "militarised police" in the US. It made me wonder if he had ever traversed La Manche. Or is he like his insular Amerloque cousins and stuck in a place where police never carry guns, which is actually a myth since British Police are armed. They just aren't armed to the extent of the French. The headline from Le Monde states: Urban riots: the use of elite police and gendarmerie units, a "conscious" strategy
BRI, RAID, GIGN... by calling in these intervention units, the Minister of the Interior wanted to make an impact. According to his entourage, this is a choice that has been "assumed and asserted".
I've already mentioned GIGN, Groupe d'intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, which is the internal version of something akin to the US's Delta Force. The other two, the brigade de recherche et d’intervention (BRI) and Recherche, Assistance, Intervention, Dissuasion (RAID) are similar units from the Police Nationale. Since 2009, RAID and the Paris Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI), a separate National Police unit reporting directly into the Paris Police Prefecture (French: Préfecture de police de Paris), have formed a task force called National Police Intervention Force (French: Force d'intervention de la Police nationale) or FIPN. When activated, the task force is headed by the RAID commander.
Renault Sherpa
This is a definite show of force as the Le Monde article points out:
"Show of force
The tone and method are changing. "Systematic intervention instructions have been given to the police", he tweeted on Thursday 29 June. That very morning, as part of the Reinforced Operational Coordination in Conurbations and Territories initiative, an initial decision authorised the gendarmerie's security and intervention platoons to take action in police zones. Then came the decision to deploy elite police and gendarmerie units in the field. According to the minister's entourage, this was a "demonstration of force that was fully assumed and claimed, with a dual operational and psychological objective".
The aim was to regain the initiative by pushing the rioters, far from the usual policing strategy, which theoretically consists of keeping the demonstrators at a distance. RAID and BRI armoured vehicles were deployed as close as possible to the clashes. At the request of the public authorities, three additional vehicles have even been loaned urgently by the manufacturer, Arquus, without the company having had time to repaint their sand-coloured livery, which is more reminiscent of military operations in the Sahel than the urban maze of the housing estates in the Paris region. For its part, the gendarmerie is lining up its brand new 4 × 4 Centaure, behemoths measuring 7.4 metres long and 14.5 tonnes, and instructing its helicopters to take off at 7pm, before nightfall, to fly over sensitive areas and provide information.
I also find that the concepts in Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen de 1789, which was the original constitution of the First French Republic and has remained in spirit in later constitutions, to be very interesting in how they relate to the obligations between the citizen and the government.
Article XII – The guarantee of the rights of man and of the citizen necessitates a public force: this force is thus instituted for the advantage of all and not for the particular utility of those in whom it is trusted.
The concept here is the maintenance of order which is also mentioned in the US Constitution (i.e.: insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence). The US Constitution makes it clear that it has a similar attitude toward insurrection, but the force charged with suppressing insurrections is the Militia (Article I, Section 8, clause 15) which is theoretically closer to the "people" than that of the French system.
There is another post on the difference between US policing and French policing, but I will say that the founders were well aware of the French system. The founders chose to stick with the British system for the most part. But there weren't organised police forces at that time in the British world.
On the other hand, the US Second Amendment has been reinterpreted in such a way that it is removed from its original context. One can arm themselves legally to a level equal to the police: maybe not that of the French Police. Does such an arms race mean that the British system is obsolete and that the police do need to be militarised?
