On Wednesday, the commissioner of Sarcelles, in the Val d’Oise, formally prohibited her agents from chasing motorists or bikers when they refused to comply. An instruction that provokes the discontent of the police unions.
The note caused an uproar in the ranks of the national police. In Sarcelles, in the Val d’Oise, the district commissioner asked her officials to no longer start a chase with motorists or bikers who refuse to comply at the time of a control, revealed The Parisian Thursday.
“The district of Sarcelles has too often been confronted with phenomena of refusal to comply, having caused serious accidents”, pleads in this note the chief of police, Fabienne Azalbert.
“If the driver of the vehicle does not immediately obey visual or sound injunctions, there will be no support tolerated”, we can read. The agents must be satisfied to write a report for refusal to comply, indicating the information on the vehicle. The owners of the machine will, in theory, be called in a second step.
The only exception provided for: hit and run offenses committed by “the perpetrator of a crime of flagrant blood”.
“It will become the party”
“It’s completely frustrating. It’s as if you were asking a baker to stop baking baguettes. The police are on the public road to arrest delinquents and we ask them to do nothing,” protested our Franck Lebas branch of the SGP Police 95 unit.
“It will become a party in difficult neighborhoods. It will even become a sport: some will go and taunt the police,” he fears.
This decision of the Commissioner of Sarcelles comes after a serious accident Sunday evening where a driver of a scooter was seriously injured in circumstances yet to be specified.
The fight against urban rodeos
“It’s scandalous! If the police do not intervene, who will?”, Protested for his part Bernard Dhailly, president of the association of residents AFCEL 95.
This retiree is particularly worried about the consequences of this instruction on the fight against urban rodeos, frequent in the town. “It’s very dangerous for pedestrians. We have children playing! I have seen people forced to move aside to let motorcycles pass,” he insists. “This instruction is incomprehensible.”
For its part, the police department of Val d’Oise explains that it favors “long-term investigations” to chases in order to “identify the perpetrators but also the places where vehicles are stored, rather than unnecessarily endangering the life of the population, the police and delinquents. “
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