French police suicide rate flummoxes government as it continues to soar

PARIS — Three riot police officers, a police commander, a police academy teacher are among eight French police officers who have died by suicide recently.

That makes 64 so far this year — and the number just keeps on climbing.

Deaths by suicide for French police now outnumber deaths in the line of duty. The protectors need protecting, say police unions, which are demanding more help to stop the problem.

Those who choose to end their lives are from everywhere in France and of all ages, many with young children. The latest death came Wednesday in the Ardèche region in southeast France. Why they step across what one police union calls the “thin blue line” remains a question that French authorities have so far been unable to answer.

A parliamentary inquiry made public in July lists a multitude of reasons for the stress and despair among French police, including overwork since a series of terrorist attacks that started in January 2015 and the weekly, often extremely violent, anti-government protests since November by the yellow vest movement seeking more economic and social justice. It does not single out any one reason.

“Given the situation today, 2019 could be the worst in the last 30 years,” said Denis Jacob, head of the Alternative Police CFDT union.

A 2018 Senate report said the French police suicide rate was 36 per cent higher than the rate for France’s general population, but also uncovered no single reason behind the suicides.

“We don’t have an understanding” of why, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner conceded in April, as he announced yet another prevention plan, the third minister in a row to do so, underlining authorities’ failure to solve the public health problem.

Significantly, Castaner acknowledged that police suicides must not be considered “external to work,” and seen as only the result of personal problems. And National Police director Eric Morvan broke a taboo, sending a letter to all officers encouraging them to talk “without fear of being judged” and saying discussing distress “is never a weakness.”

And the 2016 deadly attack on a police couple in front of their small child at their home in Magnanville, west of Paris, dramatically impacted police officers fearful for their families, she said. Some moved, changed services or resigned to protect their loved ones.

Sebastian Roché, a research director at the National Center for Scientific research, specializes in comparing police systems.He doesn’t believe that PTSD — with post-traumatic stress disorder — is at the root of the problem, noting the dip in police suicides in 2015 when deadly Islamic State attacks in France began in January and culminated in November with the Paris massacres that left 130 people dead.

“All of a sudden, their mission made sense,” he said. “The population judged them as useful.”

While suicide among police is a problem in many countries, France’s rate appears exceptionally high.

In the U.S., with a population five times that of France, 167 officers died by suicide in 2018 and 111 so far this year. In Britain, 21 to 23 police suicides a year between 2015 and 2017, but unlike in France, most British police do not have guns.