His comments were picked up by the media. On 1 December, during a Saturday demonstration of Yellow Vests in Paris, police were filmed striking a man already lying on the ground, thirteen times.
The scene unfolded in a Burger King near the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris. In a report on the police on Monday, April 8, a colonel of the gendarmerie Di Méo implicated the CRS. He was the commander of squadrons of the mobile gendarmerie on that day.
This questioning of the police by the CRS has angered the police unions, Le Point revealed .
“It’s police violence, unfortunately. When protesters talk about police violence, when I see that, I have to give them credit. We are seeing police violence,” colonel Michaël Di Méo said, denouncing the attack several times .
But according to David Michaux, national secretary of UNSA-Police such remarks are “unfortunate” and he fears that this revelation “will not fix relations between gendarmes and police”.
Michaux told Le Point: “These images are really embarrassing for us, because they do not correspond to the image we want to give of the CRS, to the values that we defend and to our way of doing things. The visuals are very disturbing, that’s for sure, and it will be up to the IGPN to decide on these events.” The trade unionist continued: “If there have been failures, they will of course have to be penalized.”
On social networks, the CRS was severely abused, as was the colonel of gendarmerie. “There will be some tension, that’s for sure,” predicted Michaux. “These challenges go very badly, especially since we, too, sometimes have things to say about the work of our colleagues,” says the policeman.
In France and some Francophone countries, the gendarmerie is a branch of the armed forces responsible for internal security in parts of the country – primarily in rural areas and small towns in the case of France – with additional duties as a military police for the armed forces.