Police and refusal to comply: Mélenchon persists and signs

June 8, 2022

Jean-Luc Mélenchon on Tuesday defended his controversial tweets against a “police that kills” after the death of the passenger of a car victim of police fire during a check in Paris, promising if he were Prime Minister to “change the doctrine of the use of police force”.

Asked about France Inter to find out if he maintained his positions, he replied: “Of course. It’s my duty to do it. Do you think I write like that, out of distraction?”

He explained that his first tweet having “meeted no response”, he “raised the tone”, and thus “I get what I want: thousands of people hear that there is at least one person in this country, a political leader, who does not accept the evolution of the use of police force as it is today defined by the political power that commands”, he explained.

“I want to talk about it,” he insisted. “We are at four deaths in four months for refusal to comply,” he denounced, asking “what were we accusing (the girl who died on Saturday) to the point of shooting her down”.

He also rejected the criticisms that have come from the right and from the ranks of the government, emanating according to him “from political leaders all of the right or of the extreme right”.

“Anticop”, “I have never been”, he defended himself: “I am against the disproportionate use of violence”.

“If you vote for me, I will change the doctrine of the use of police force in our country, and I say that it is not normal that someone is killed because there is refusal to comply ” in a country where “the death penalty does not exist”.

By calling on “republican police officers”, he again attacked the “factious behavior” of members of police “politico-union organizations” who “demonstrate against justice”, warning them that “they will be laid off if they continue” if he was Prime Minister.

“If I am Prime Minister, from the cellar to the attic we will reform the police”, he added, pleading for “a police force of peacekeepers, a local police force, a lot of judicial police who run after traffickers of weapons, of human beings and of drugs, and between the two of the forces to protect the right to demonstrate”.

In two tweets on Saturday and Sunday, Mr. Mélenchon denounced “a police (which) kills”, guilty of applying “the death penalty for a refusal to comply” and exercising “an unacceptable abuse of power”. “The prefect approves? The minister congratulates? When is the shame?”