Their installation will necessarily be less time-consuming and costly than a traditional gendarmerie building. And for good reason, these are trucks. This Monday, October 2, Emmanuel Macron announced the arrival of 238 gendarmerie brigades in rural areas. Between “one and three or four brigades per department” are planned, explains those around him.
The first should arrive from “November 2023”, and 2,144 gendarmes will be recruited for the occasion. Job creations which will occur throughout the five-year term. Some of these brigades will be fixed, with around “ten” people. Others will be mobile, that is to say they will be vans or campervans. They will include 6 gendarmes.
An extension of the fixed brigades
To the 3,049 existing gendarmerie brigades, 93 fixed and 145 mobile brigades will be added. The latter will be particularly present in places “requiring an increased presence” of the State, explains the Ministry of the Interior, “either by ensuring regular reception in one or more third places which can accommodate other public services”. or “by ensuring a presence and temporary reception from an advanced mobile station as close as possible to users”. Depending on the region, between 10 (in Brittany) and 18 (in Occitanie) mobile brigades will appear.
This novelty is described as a “gem of technology” by the Elysée, as well as a response to the loss of several brigades in rural and peri-urban areas in recent years. These vehicles will offer “the same services as a fixed brigade”, they say at the Elysée. They will be equipped with radio and computer resources. Inside, it will be possible to carry out prevention missions, take complaints, and carry out hearings. In the event of a crisis, the van can be used as a forward command post. In 2021, law enforcement had already started to use the Ubiquity software, a laptop that can be connected “to any network” and allows “to carry out investigative actions outside the brigade” thanks to procedure writing software, it is specified at the Elysée.
A digital and human question
Quicker to set up than barracks to be built “on the ground”, these mobile gendarmes are also less expensive. By increasing the number of vans, the executive also intends to limit costs: the Elysée estimates the operation of these agile brigades at around 70,000 euros per year. In a context of downsizing for more than ten years, the mobility desired by the executive is therefore a way of meeting the needs of rural areas. It is reminiscent of another initiative, presented in the 1990s to the Minister of Defense at the time, François Léotard – the gendarmes did not yet depend on Beauvau -, the advanced mobile posts.
The deployment of this system will be a way, the executive hopes, of helping to “reestablish the police-population link and respond in part to the crisis of authority”, while more than 500 brigades were abolished in 2007 and 2016 . “The gendarmerie brigades were created around 1720, to respond to a need to occupy public space. The idea was to strengthen the presence of the State by establishing units throughout the territory , explains François Dieu, professor of political science at Toulouse Capitole University and author of several works on the gendarmerie. Today, proximity is less linked to concrete than to a digital, and above all human, presence.
Because the proximity of law enforcement to residents is uneven. According to an INSEE estimate published in 2021, the rate of police and gendarmes is on average 34 agents per 10,000 inhabitants. In a chapter of the book Rural areas in France, Colonel Patrice Dubois noted the French distribution of security forces in the country: 150,000 police officers are spread over 5% of the territory, responsible for 50% of the population. The national gendarmerie, which has 95,000 personnel, ensures the security of the other half, spread over 95% of the territory, mainly in peri-urban and rural areas. The mobile brigades will therefore cover a large part of the territory. “Ensuring the protection of these areas requires a particular organization to exercise local security, in an environment where the concentration of the population can be relatively high or, on the contrary, very diluted,” notes the soldier.