French Police to Sue State by Hand-Delivering the Lawsuit to Every Ministry in Person, One Officer Per Floor
Alliance Police Nationale has decided that filing a lawsuit electronically is insufficient, and will instead dispatch officers to physically carry the complaint through every corridor of the French state, floor by floor, ministry by ministry, until someone accepts responsibility for the orders that put them in harm's way.
PARIS — The Alliance Police Nationale union announced Tuesday that it will sue the French state by physically hand-delivering its complaint to every ministry in the Republic, one officer per floor, in a procession expected to take eleven days and require the temporary closure of the entire seventh arrondissement.
Union representative Stanislas Goudon said the decision to walk the complaint through the corridors of power was made after the government failed to respond to the union's concerns about command orders during the recent unrest. «We tried the normal channels,» Goudon told reporters outside the Interior Ministry. «Now we are the normal channels.»
The procession will begin at the Ministry of Interior and proceed to Justice, then Finance, then Health, then Education, then back to Interior, because, as Goudon explained, «someone there needs to hear it twice.» Each officer will carry a single page of the complaint, and the pages will be reassembled at the end of the route in the courtyard of the École Militaire, where the union intends to read the document aloud in its entirety.
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has been assigned a personal escort of four officers for the duration of the delivery, a detail the ministry described as «a courtesy» and the union described as «the first time anyone has escorted us anywhere without a shield.»
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu's office confirmed it has reserved a conference room for the arrival of the procession, and has ordered additional chairs. «We are taking this seriously,» a spokesperson said. «We have ordered the chairs.»
By Wednesday morning, three other unions had requested their own procession slots, and the prefecture of police had begun printing maps of the route for public distribution.
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