In Paris, we have a police chief who is hated by the population. So much so that many call him “the Nazi,” a pun made with his name in French, Didier “Lallement.”
It began in March 2019. During a demonstration by the Yellow Vests a fire broke out at Le Fouquet’s restaurant, a Paris restaurant on the Champs Elysées, a symbol of the rich who go to eat there frequently. After this fire, Lallement replaced the previous chief supposedly to prevent events like these from happening again, and therefore, his mission was to toughen the repression immediately.
He had been the police chief of Gironde (Bordeaux), where during the Yellow Vest movement the police he commanded had gouged out many eyes with their rubber bullets and torn up many hands.
Since his appointment, he has been in the spotlight for having said in March that the people in hospitals with the coronavirus were those who failed to comply with lockdown, and he had to publicly apologize. Another time, speaking to a woman in the Yellow Vest movement who was calling him out, he said: “Madame, we are not in the same camp,” at which point Macron had been forced to say, “the police are not a camp.”
He has a truly authoritarian conception of the police, and gives very tough orders as to how to deal with the demonstrators. Lately, it was he who ordered the shameful expulsion of migrants from Place de la République in Paris, and allowed the police to beat journalists. It is again he who would like to outlaw demonstrations against the “Global Security Law,” which includes an article that would ban any filming of cops.
In short, this police chief is quite a symbol. The symbol of this government that serves the rich who, in order to enforce their class policy, use a police force managed by a chief that they take great pleasure in obeying!
