Paris (France) (AFP) – “Investigators pilloried”, “anti-police indictment!”, “lamentable, pathetic”: the Minister of Justice and former Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin has heated up the police by criticizing them in a letter to Laurent Nuñez following the Lyhanna affair.

Published on: 02/09/2026 - 16:25

A month after the revelation of this 12-page note sent at the end of July by Gérald Darmanin to his Interior counterpart, investigators, senior officials, unions and commissioners questioned by AFP see the return to school eight months before the presidential election in a dim light.

All requested anonymity, except the union officials.

"We do not measure the impact on the investigators" of this note where they "are destroyed by their own prosecutors (...), it will leave traces when we try to relaunch the investigation", summarizes a senior police official.

In this note, Gérald Darmanin summarizes the information provided by the public prosecutor's offices on sexual violence against children, which has become the priority of his ministry since the wave of indignation caused by the Lyhanna affair, named after the 11-year-old schoolgirl found dead in June in the Gers. The suspect, Jérôme Barella, had been the subject of several complaints for sexual violence against minors without being worried.

What emerges is a litany of “structural” dysfunctions, writes Mr. Darmanin, which relate to the question of resources, training, tools and management. And ultimately a target: the police. “The investigators are like crazy, they are implicated following a case (Lyhanna) which concerns the gendarmes and the magistrates!” chokes up a head of investigation.

Calling for “the rapid opening of joint work” between the two ministries, the Minister of Justice proposed a meeting on September 3. But on Wednesday, no trace of this meeting in the diaries. Place Vendôme, it is suggested that the meeting is postponed.

On the police side, it doesn't matter, "we expected nothing from this meeting", assures Grégory Joron, secretary general of Un1té Police FO.

Loïc Travers, deputy secretary general of Alliance, deplores “a communications operation” by Gérald Darmanin. For him, the reform of the national police, which Alliance had defended, is “not complete”.

This reform implemented by Gérald Darmanin, and developed by Laurent Nuñez when he was Secretary of State under Christophe Castaner at Place Beauvau, is strongly criticized by PJ investigators.

“We no longer expect anything from them, less than eight months before the presidential election,” asserts Franck Nicolle of the National Association of Judicial Police (ANPJ), whose organization had criticized, at the beginning of August, the “hypocrisy” and “betrayal” of the Minister of Justice, who was proud of his longevity in Beauvau (four years and two months).

"Fan"

“We have to go to the box. Scream that it’s not possible to stop there. The boat is sinking,” enrages the head of investigation. A commissioner accuses Gérald Darmanin of looking for scapegoats to exonerate himself: “He uses a fan with shit in front of it”.

Laurent Nuñez promised to "respond point by point" to his colleague's note and warned that he was going to "contest a certain number of things".

Its services set to work to verify all the figures put forward and particularly those relating, according to the prosecutors, to the existence of a gigantic "ghost stock", files not listed by the courts because they were not transmitted to them.

A report two years ago estimated the stock of unprocessed files at “a little over three million”. Reducing it had been one of the government's arguments for reforming the police and its PJ component.

Added to this was the presidential injunction to “put blue on the streets”. “That day, the public security format was imposed and the investigation was sacrificed. It was the disaster predicted,” said an investigator.

Unions, investigators, commissioners, all highlight the necessary “simplification of criminal procedure” and above all ask for efficient digital tools to ensure the traceability of procedures. “We are in the digital stone age and we cannot envisage improvement for two years,” says Grégory Joron. “Our procedural software does statistics, not procedures. Our ministries, he says, are addicted to numbers.”

Everyone considers that the question of means is necessary, but in the current budgetary context, the prospects are poor. For Frédéric Lauze, general secretary of the union of police commissioners (SCPN), “the main part of the problem is political”.

© 2026 AFP

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