Maggy Biskupski, 36, had been under investigation for speaking to the media about attacks against the police without permission from her superiors.
She was discovered dead in her home outside Paris, having apparently shot herself with her service weapon. Biskupski was the founder and leader of France’s Angry Police Movement, or MPC, which she created after two officers were badly injured by a Molotov cocktail attack in 2016.
The incident sparked protests by France’s police force, with protesters denouncing the rise of anti-police sentiment and demanding more resources to address public safety.
Her death marks 30 police suicides in France since January, according to AFP. But other outlets have reported much higher numbers. The suicide of Antoine Boutonnet, France’s former police chief in charge of fighting hooligan violence, puts the tally at 45 in one year.
That number does not even include the 16 suicides by members of the country’s military police, The Local France reported.
Biskupski allegedly killed herself on the evening of Monday, November 12, at her home in Carrières-sous-Poissy (Yvelines), reported Le Parisien.
She was an employee of the anti-crime brigade (BAC) of Yvelines. She had come forward to denounce the growing malaise of her colleagues, during the events of Viry-Châtillon (Essonne) in October 2016.
Two groups of criminals had stormed two police vehicles by means of Molotov cocktails and two members of the security forces had been severely burned.
Because she had spoken out to help her colleagues, Biskupski was subjected to a police investigation (IGPN). “I chose a fight that I am proud to lead. This is important because it does not only concern the national police, but everyone’s safety. […] So when I received the IGPN, I continued,” she said last January.
For one of her last public appearances, in a broadcast on September 22, she testified to the “fear” she felt in the performance of her duties, even sleeping with a weapon in her bedroom.
Also invited to the show, leftist film maker Yann Moix had replied to the officer: “If you come here to say that the police are afraid, you know that weakness fuels hatred. […] I frankly find that pretending to be a victim on a TV show, not only ridicules you to the population, but especially to the people that you humiliate all day long. Because your favorite targets are the poor and the underprivileged.”
Marine Le Pen tweeted that Biskupski was the “terrible symbol of the suffering of the police she denounced tirelessly. This suffering overpowered her, and it’s a big shock to all of us”.
Le suicide de #MaggyBiskupski, présidente de l’association « Mobilisation des Policiers en Colère », est le terrible symbole de la souffrance des policiers qu’elle dénonçait inlassablement. Cette souffrance a eu raison d’elle, et c’est un grand choc pour nous tous.
— Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) November 13, 2018
In 2016, a police woman Sandra Bertin was hounded by government authorities because she said she had seen no armed national police officers when the truck driven by a jihadist entered a no-go area on CCTV footage in Nice. There were only unarmed municipal police present. “If they’d been armed like our national police colleagues have demanded, they could have stopped it,” she told an official enquiry.
In a later interview Bertin claimed that the following day the interior minister’s office sent a commissioner who asked her to state the presence of national police officers. “I told the person that I would only write what I had seen. Perhaps the national police were there, but I didn’t see them on the cameras,” Bertin insisted.
The municipal policewoman of Nice was accused of defamation by the former Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve shortly after the attack of July 14, 2016 on the Promenade des Anglais.
