Police in France choose to take their own lives more easily than other sections of society, an officer who attempted suicide twice has told RT. She believes her colleagues suffer trauma from their work and from public anger directed at them.
Aurelie hides her face from the camera and will not disclose her real name. She has served in law enforcement for more than two decades, after joining at the age of 19. There was a time when she was very excited about her job. But then the pressure of it became harder and harder to bear.

“They always say that these are personal issues. We must stop saying that,” Aurelie tells RT’s Charlotte Dubenskij. “Police officers are traumatized by their work. They decide to commit suicide more easily than the others. Why? Not because they have weapons on them. How many of them hang themselves, throw themselves under trains, take pills? My female colleague, 49 years old, killed herself last week with a hunting rifle.”

Aurelie attempted to kill herself twice, with the latest incident coming just seven months ago. She does not deny there was a personal aspect to it: “I was considered a trouble-maker. I also had problems in my private life and with my children. I felt abandoned. You spend your entire life to build your personal and professional life – and one day you say to yourself: everything would be better without me.”

But the personal troubles were worsened by professional burnout. Although a nearly two-year state of emergency in France ended recently with President Emmanuel Macron’s tough counterterrorism law, the impact it had on the police was vast.

“We suffered enormously physically and psychologically from the terrorist attacks. We worked extremely hard – but that was our duty. What was really bad was that we were not given the tools to fight terrorism. Some police officers received new weapons, some received training – but not all of us. The measures that they introduced were miniscule.”

Aurelie also blames the government for the French police force’s tarnished image.
“Our administration is taking decisions and the people’s anger is turning against us. We are suffering from the image our government created for us. Today many people are calling for policemen to be killed.”

It was Aurelie’s children who helped her to pull through eventually. “I realized that my child will come home that day – and it saved my life. But the lack of humanity in police nowadays leads to the situation when many of my colleagues prefer to die instead of fighting.”

But dozens of other police officers have succumbed to the extreme pressures they face. This month, the French Interior Ministry revealed figures on police suicides, saying 2017 alone has seen 46 officers and 16 members of the gendarmerie take their lives. Last weekend, another officer committed suicide after going on a killing rampage.

“Faced with daily human misery, violence and with the worst that can be found in humans, police can no longer stand this lack of respect, a factor in coming closer to the dramatic act [of suicide],”said the SGP police union.

General secretary of the National Police Commissioners’ Union (NPCS), Céline Berthon, added her thoughts. “Police and gendarmes have been very busy defending others for two years, maybe that has led them to taking less care about themselves and maybe it has also led to exhaustion,” she said.

In the past, the grim statistics of some 85 suicides in 2014 triggered the then interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, to unveil a set of measures aimed at cutting the numbers. These included recruitment of additional psychologists, lockers for storing service firearms after work, as well as a change to working hours. The number of suicides went down after that, but apparently not for long, as the 2017 statistics show. For officers such as Aurelie and many like her, the struggle will continue until their voices are heard and the strain they are under is properly addressed.

Original

With the number of suicides in the French police in 2014 passing 50 on Friday the government is under pressure to deal with a growing crisis. The Local asks a police union chief what is pushing so many officers to end their lives.
On November 24th a young policewoman based near Paris was sitting in a friend’s garden when she took out her service weapon and turned it on herself.

Just days earlier in Bastia, on the island of Corsica, a young police captain took her own life when she grabbed a colleagues gun and shot herself.

These incidents were not isolated.

On Friday a tweet from a police union announced that a policeman in the north of France had shot himself at home to become the 50th officer to take his own life since the start of the year. That compares to 40 last year and 43 in 2011 and 2012, with another month still to come.

France’s police union leaders say officers are suffering from what the French call a “ras-le-bol”, a fatigue or malaise, that basically means they’ve had enough.

The country’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve is under pressure to act and he has called for measures to be introduced in early 2015 to prevent police suicides.

David-Olivier Reverdy from the police union Alliance told The Local on Thursday that there was now real crisis in the police force.

While he accepts there are always “multiple factors” behind suicides, he says the fact remains that there are fundamental problems with the French police force that is pushing many over the edge.

“Some of these suicides are clearly down to problems in their personal lives, but there is clearly a malaise among police officers,” he said.

Reverdy points to “archaic” management systems, working conditions, pressure from bosses, and a lack of protection from the government given the fact that “no one these days seems to be too scared to physically attack police officers”.

Reverdy blasts reforms by the Ministry of Justice Christiane Taubira that has seen community service punishments handed out for certain offences rather than prison offences – a reform aimed at easing the pressure on France’s creaking prisons which are home to a record number of inmates.

“The French people understand our problems, they support the police but at the same time, in places like Marseille, they are shooting at us, with the blessing of the Ministry of Justice,” Reverdy says.

“The government has sent out the wrong message,” he said. “They are not listening to us. We have lost trust in the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Interior.”

France as a country suffers from one of the highest suicide rates in Europe but a recent study concluded that police officers in the country had a 36 percent higher chance of taking of their own life than the ordinary population.

The root of the problem according to Reverdy is that police chiefs are asking already overworked officers “to do more for less”.

One officer named Paula who called a French radio station after she herself had attempted to commit suicide simply blamed: “harassment from management” for the crisis.

“We are there to help people, but no one is there to help us. We see children killed, fatal road accidents, suicides, but we can’t go home and talk to our families about our day at work,” she said.

Police also complain of being stigmatized by elements of the general public. A problem not helped by high profile incidents such as the death of Remi Fraisse, who was killed by a police stun grenade during clashes at an anti-dam protest, or a shocking incident of a Canadian tourist raped at a Paris police HQ.

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