> What are you talking about civil and military police in "continental Europe"?

You just outlined it yourself, take away the military's own police and you have, in your words,

1. a police which polices regular peope

and

2. sometimes a gendermerie which is sometimes nominally a part of the army

You also go on to give several examples of this system being used in continental Europe. You could've added in Spain and Italy too.

I'm really not sure why you asked the question if you're going to answer it yourself.

If you're looking for a non-continental police force which does not follow that system then you only need compare with the UK or Ireland.

> In any case, the problems with policing in Europe aren't even close to those in the US, and i don't think any of then can be attributed to hving two policing entities with different scopes.

So you say. From[1]:

> Covell was among the 87 protesters wounded when police baton-charged the Diaz school in Genoa, beating people as they cowered in their sleeping bags and planting petrol bombs to justify the raid.

> Once arrested, protesters, including five Britons, were taken to a police barracks where they were beaten again, sprayed with asphyxiating gas, threatened with rape and forced to sing fascist-era songs.

> Despite the handing out of verdicts including convictions for grievous bodily harm and falsifying evidence in two major trials, Italy's tardy justice system has ensured final appeals are yet to be heard and most sentences have been timed out by the statute of limitations. "No one has ever been arrested or gone to jail," said Massimo Pastore, a lawyer who has represented Covell and other activists.

That's not even the half of it. Do you think this is an isolated incident? Can you divorce this from militarised policing?

Perhaps you'll disagree and then answer the questions again, that would be helpful.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/12/night-police-b...

If you don’t understand the implications of the word “nominally”, here, then you really don’t understand anything about the gendarmerie. To compare it with the American policing model is beyond ludicrous.

This is how an armed, barricaded suspect is handled in France. Watch until the end, with captions. https://youtu.be/0Bx5PRqYAig

American police would definitely have killed that dog.

I really like the way you cherry picked an example that allows for an apologetic on paramilitary policing. I, on the other hand, will rely on statistics, as well as horrifying examples. From an article[1] entitled Do French Lives Matter?:

> The scale of police violence was astonishing and stomach-churning. Between November 2018 and June 2019, according to figures compiled by Médiapart, 860 protesters were injured by the police – 315 suffered head injuries; 24 lost the use of an eye; and five had hands torn off. In December 2018, an elderly woman who had no involvement in the protests was killed when police threw a grenade into her flat.

> Among these victims are not only protesters but also journalists and medics. Police have been filmed beating elderly and disabled people, as well as using tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets against peaceful protesters. The main source of injuries was ‘Flashball’ rubber bullets – a non-lethal weapon that has been banned in every EU country except France. More than 13,000 of these bullets were fired in the first three months of the protests. Another extreme weapon used by police was the GLI-F4 – a teargas grenade which contains explosives that maimed numerous protesters. The grenade was eventually banned by the French government in early 2020.

> Things got so bad that the UN called for a ‘full investigation’ into the police’s ‘excessive use of force’. Similarly, the Council of Europe’s human-rights commissioner called for an end to the use of Flashballs against protesters. Amnesty International denounced the ‘extremely heavy-handed’ policing deployed against peaceful protesters. Eventually, even the French government acknowledged it had a problem with police violence.

"you really don’t understand anything about the gendarmerie" is an interesting take for someone who ignores a paramilitary group that throws grenades at grannies, blinds people and tears off hands, and beats the elderly and disabled.

> To compare it with the American policing model is beyond ludicrous.

Au contraire, I don't remember the American police beating up the elderly and disabled - or creating disabled people - en masse, in such a short space of time. Maybe you do, but it wouldn't make the comparison ludicrous. Dismissing it, however…

[1] https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/02/do-french-lives-mat...

Edit: grenades at grannies, not grenades at grenades. The real mistake was giving the police grenades in the first place though.

I'm a bit late, but you're so wrong on so many levels i can't let this slide.

First, the numbers are indeed atrocious. But they're the result of massive civil unrest which included mass civil disobedience, occasional looting and burning private property, and fighting with police ( so it wasn't just the police randomly shooting at people) which went on for months, which explains some of it.

Second, the numbers are for the police and gendermerie violence, (the latter helped because the civil unrest was massive, at the start it was mostly police). You can't just pin them all on the gendermerie because you have a preconceived notion they're the problem.

> Au contraire, I don't remember the American police beating up the elderly and disabled - or creating disabled people - en masse, in such a short space of time. Maybe you do, but it wouldn't make the comparison ludicrous

The model is different, and so are the consequences, which I wasn't talking about. US police are barely trained, suffer no consequences, and have military grade equipment. None of that applies even to the "militarised" (for you) gendermerie.

In France there was unrest, people destroying property and fighting police occasionally as a part of it. Police responded hard after initially doing nothing. Again, it was initially police, and then the gendermerie was also sent to help. Violence was done by both of them.

TL;DR a police officer from higher ground shot an armed, suicidal person in the leg so that he could not commit suicide and/or hurt his family members. Very well handled, my respect from NL. I cannot imagine this happening in USA, btw.

I feel compelled to add the following:

The Gendarmerie Captain on scene then rushes to the man's mother, takes her in his arms and says "He's okay, he's okay. It was us. He's alive."

That's the Police I would fully trust, support, and definitely would want to have around when I need them.

You are of course right.

(I unfortunately don't understand much of the French language.)

I asked because the gendermerie in most of the listed countries ( Spain, France, Italy) is nominally a part of the military ( a military branch like the army, navy, etc.) but is run by the respective Ministry of the Interior, and has a different scope. And most of all, they aren't more heavily armed than the regular police ( maybe slightly more than municipal police officers in the places that have them, but in France i can't say there's a difference in day to day armament and etc. - the French Gendermerie have a rapid response team, and some heavier equipment for when required ( snipers, lightly armoured vehicles), unlike municipal police). So i object to the term `militarised police`, because it doesn't represent reality - gendermeries in France, Italy, Spain aren't more military-like than regular police. And the same goes for the gendermeries in Eastern Europe ( including OMON in Russia and some other ex-Soviet states) - they're trained for counter-terrorism, riot control, have nothing to do with the actual military, even nominally, and while they have slightly heavier weaponry than regular police ( lightly armoured vehicles, etc.), they don't do day-to-day policing ( and sometimes don't even have the jurisdiction for it), and are only involved when big things are happening ( massive protests or matches or w/e).

Furthermore, i object to the claim that they are somehow an issue in policing. The article you've linked says just "police", so i doubt they're talking about the Carabinieri. In France, the Gendermerie ( countryside and small towns and cities) has a better reputation with regards to violence than the Police Nationale ( which only operate in cities); i can't think of a single high-profile police violence incident where the Gendermerie were involved. And when the Police Nationale were protesting due to overworking and unpaid overtime, the Gendermerie were the ones providing protection. Apparently the Spanish Guardia Civil also has a better reputation than regular Spanish police. In recent years the French army has started doing patrols in mainland France, among potentially high-profile targets ( airports, train stations, tourist hot spots)

So if anything, having two different branches of police seems beneficial in those specific cases.

And neither type of gendermerie has anything close to the equipment the US police has.

The gendarmes have grenades, as I've mentioned in another comment, do the municipal police?

Why would police need grenades, of all things?

Does the US police use grenades?

> i can't think of a single high-profile police violence incident where the Gendermerie were involved.

Have the US police ever killed an unarmed protestor with their hands in the air using a grenade? From[1]:

> Statements from several eye witnesses show that Rémi, 21, had his hands in the air and was calling on gendarmes to stop firing when he was struck and killed by an offensive grenade. Their accounts also cast some doubts over the version of events given by the authorities about the student's death.

Perhaps you were just unaware.

[1] https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/270316/eco-protes...

teargas grenades.... Because they sometimes need to split protestors or force them to go another way.

At least in France there is a history of hatred and ego between the Police Nationale and the Gendarmerie.

Since they do the same work, do not share and duplicate the efforts it wild make sense to just merge them.

But that would require some people to let go kingdoms.

Having worked extensively with both, the way they are organized today is a pity.