“On Thursday we started working early, at ten in the morning. The problems started around three in the afternoon. We didn’t know that the situation was going to degenerate so much. We didn’t know that this was going to be like in the war. We finished at five in the morning. It’s 17 hours fighting against extreme violence, trying to prevent them from attacking businesses and assaulting people. It’s 17 hours to prevent the city from burning.”
The speaker is Theo (changed name), father of three children and member of the security forces in Marseille, France’s second city, and one of the places where the wave of violence has intensified the most in recent days. The riots in the country began last Tuesday after the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old boy, by the shot of an agent at a control in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris. The riots, which broke out in the neighborhoods of the country’s main cities, have spread rapidly throughout the country.
Marseille is one of the hot spots. Theo has worked two days, the hardest. He tells EL MUNDO how he lives it.
“We had three very intense nights. On the one hand, because of the extreme violence that we have seen and, on the other hand, because there are many hours committed, involved. People have to understand that, without law enforcement, cities would be a lot of ashes”.
This agent explains that they feel impotent, because every time they arrest a violent person, two come out on another corner. “We make arrests but we know, or feel, that it is a waste of time. The mass of people capable of doing harm is such that even if we arrest 15, 20, 200, 400 of them, in the end it is like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon”.
This policeman tells that, after three days working in very stressful conditions, they are psychologically exhausted. “We are armored in the physical aspect, but in the moral plane we are destroyed.”
“All these businesses burned, destroyed, looted… We have a lot of empathy for these merchants and the people who support us. This is very hard. As soon as we have secured a street or a neighborhood, with all our efforts, we have to quickly go another place occupied by another group”.
He explains that the attackers and looters are “groups that are made up of fast people with an anti-police ideology”, but also “parasites, people who don’t even know what happened to Nahel, the dead boy. They don’t give a damn, and they use this as an excuse to destroy”.
His team arrested 12 looters and 7 rioters on Thursday and 16 looters on Friday. In Marseille there were 82 detainees on Thursday. In France there are already more than 3,000 in five nights.
Theo recounts the attacks they suffer: they say they throw Molotov cocktails, flammable objects, cobblestones, boiling water…
“We have a good team, so there are not many physically injured colleagues. I insist on the physical because morally we are on the ground, we feel alone,” he says.
They fear, after so many hours working under stress, making a mistake. “We are not afraid of the situation or of the assailants. We are afraid because after 14 hours of involvement and continuous work, you are exhausted and you no longer have the same resources when it comes to acting, you do not have the same discernment.”
-How do you assess the reaction of your colleague, the one who gave the shot to Nahel?
“He had a few seconds to react and he made the wrong decision, but he was a formidable agent, who had received decorations and has the respect and trust of his superiors. He made a bad decision.”
He says that his modus operandi is methodical: “We fired tear gas to disperse. Until now the slogan was to be more contained, precisely to avoid more incidents or making a mistake, but if this continues like this, it will change.”
“If we weren’t here this would be ashes. You know those apocalypse movies where people go out to loot, assault and vandalize? That’s Marseille these days.”
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
