Gérald Darmanin, Minister of the Interior, has decided to take up the fight against homophobic attacks. In the columns of La Voix du Nord, Thursday, April 20, he detailed several measures aimed at better preventing this violence and allowing better support for victims.
Among them, the training of police officers and gendarmes “already in post”, while “since this year, 100% of police officers and gendarmes have in their training a module on violence against LGBT people”. He claims to “give himself a year” so that “all the police and gendarmes spend at least a day or half a day to understand that there are specific qualifications in the law and that it is necessary to be able to support the victims. “.
The objective is also “to install referents everywhere”, on the model of Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille and Cayenne, where “we put an LGBT referent in the services, that is to say a police officer or a gendarme who is specialized, trained, who advises his comrades”. A device that works “very well”, he assures, announcing that he will “take an instruction next season to generalize this in each of the police stations and in each of the gendarmerie brigades”.
It will also be a question of “mapping the places where there is the most violence against LGBT people” to be “more present via a video protection policy”, “more national police officers at certain times”, but also “links with the owners of bars and discotheques who can give information to intervene “.
According to “the only figures from the national police”, excluding the police prefecture and the national gendarmerie, there was, in 2022, “a 10% increase in offenses related to the sexual orientation of the victim”.