2024-03-26 09:29:42
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, during a “Place net XXL” operation against drug trafficking, in Roubaix (North), March 25, 2024. DENIS CHARLET / AFP
The battle plan was taped to the hood of a police car parked in a street in Roubaix (North) with red brick facades. In front of an audience of officers and television cameras, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, plays the field general, stationed in front of this map of the Lille metropolitan area topped with the title: “Operation “XXL Net Square” in the North”. The former mayor of Tourcoing (North) is familiar with the area. Today’s operation began a few hours earlier, Monday March 25, at dawn, at several trading points in Lille, Roubaix and Tourcoing.
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Commissioner Thierry Courtecuisse is reporting. The interdepartmental police director in the North emphasizes that already at the end of this morning “75% of the objectives have been achieved”, with 74 arrests, as well as a seizure of 500 grams of heroin, four weapons and 70,000 euros in assets. The operation, which mobilizes more than 900 agents, “was prepared in the greatest secrecy for several months”, specifies the minister. According to our information, the locations, the objectives and the volume of arrests were decided within Mr. Darmanin’s office itself, a practice which causes coughing in the local prosecutor’s offices, theoretically responsible for leading the criminal action.
On the map placed on the hood, pictograms indicate the priority objectives. Silhouettes of convicts symbolize the individuals to be arrested – 850 of them are expected by the ministry across France. Green cannabis leaves locate the deal points to be eradicated; stylized houses, businesses to be controlled – in total, 59, like the department number.
Saliva tests
The Lille component of these anti-narcotics operations, widely publicized, casts a wider net than illicit substances. According to the prefecture and gendarmerie officials, they also brought to light cases of vehicle theft, burglaries, various incivility (graffiti, etc.), as well as a “exotic animal trafficking” – the discovery of several servals. “A good way to artificially inflate the balance sheet of these operations”quips a police commissioner, “not hostile to the method, on the condition of occupying the field longer, in coordination with elected officials and social actors”.
Monday morning, Gérald Darmanin did not have to share the stage with the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, or Emmanuel Macron, a last-minute guest in Marseille on March 19. A way of taking back this political moment of “clear places”, which also marks the last weeks before the European elections on June 9. The Minister of the Interior took the opportunity to reel out his argument, in particular his intention to show, thanks to legislative developments, “harder on consumers”which he considers “often from the bourgeois class”. Visiting Lyon on Friday March 22, he mentioned the possibility of authorizing law enforcement to carry out saliva tests on public roads in order to fine consumers.
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