© Ollie Richardson
Ollie Richardson: Photo taken by me at the June 29, 2019 Yellow Vest demonstration in Paris
I think by now most people who are interested in geopolitics are familiar with the "Yellow Vests" movement and the social unrest in France, but one topic that receives almost no mainstream media coverage (neither in the Anglophone nor French press), and which the French government deliberately ignores, is police suicide. At the time of writing - July 25th - there have been
66 police suicides in France so far in 2019. According to the President of the association "Uniformes en danger" Christelle Teixeira,
88 police officers killed themselves in 2018. At the current rate in 2019 it means that
every four days a police officer kills themselves. This
epidemic of suicides in the ranks of law enforcement is becoming an endemic problem that some people sometimes like to compare to the suicidal tendencies of French farmers, who have also been hit hard by socio-economic distress and drought.
Thus, according to a Senate report from June 2018, the rate of suicide in the French police is 36% higher than what is seen in the general population. Concerning farmers, the same rate was 20% to 30% higher than the average for the French population, according to a study published by the "Public Health of France" agency in 2016. It is a similar trend, but with a big difference concerning police officers and gendarmes: they all have the same employer - the state; and the same boss, the Interior Minister Christophe Castaner. The plans that were launched in the past to try to solve the problem, especially in May 2018 under the leadership of Gerard Collomb, are considered to be too weak by some police officers, who cite the daily grind and the
"social context that is currently tense in many socio-professional categories", as Jean-Pierre Colombies
explains.
Comment: It will be interesting to see how the Modi government manages to get this bill passed in India's upper house, the Rajya Sabha, where it is little short of majority...
See also: Modi's Minority Report: Indian PM strikes a pitch for greater Muslim Inclusiveness.