Cops are still investigating the attack....one of their own (an IT expert) brought in a knife to the 'station' and stabbed dead four of his associates, before being shot by another policeman.
Quietly this morning.....through some of the news media in Paris...someone kinda noted that this guy in the early part of 2018, had converted over to Islam. Native French guy? That's a curious thing....he came originally from Martinique (a French isle in the Caribbean).
So this was a terror act? Well....no one wants to say that. So it got brought up by particular journalists today in French news, that roughly 51 French police have committed suicide in the past year.
What you find odd eventually, after thinking over it....is the question of how 51 professional French officers reached a point of severe desperation, and how this French police IT guy himself....reached a point of severe desperation.
Desperation is something that I always saw on a sliding scale.....say one to ten. A normal person will have a problem occur and easily go from zero to one or two....almost weekly. Something is supposed to work, and fails. Your boss gave you a tough project and you marginally delivered it....with criticism. A traffic jam of enormous size occurs, and you stand to be 30 minutes late to work.
Maybe in a yearly period, you might have one or two incidents which rate as a '5' or '6'....the wife threatens to leave some guy, or a flight to return you home on the 23rd of December has been cancelled, and you stand to be stuck there until the afternoon of Christmas. These are serious things, but they aren't typically the type to trigger suicidal thoughts.
So I look at this police IT expert and kinda wonder....he got that morning and was determined to die before the end of the day. Along the way, he'd kill a couple of his work-associates. Maybe the wife noted that he acted odd, or maybe he just carried on his normal morning cheerful 'act'.
Why so many cops in this desperation behavior? If you follow French news over the past couple of years, there's three things that stand out.
First, terrorism has stood out and been a major focus almost daily. Between the attacks, the clean-up action, and the attempt to prevent more terrorism.....it's probably hurt the police ranks more than any other group in France.
Second, most everyone admits that the over-time record for French police is way up. Unpaid overtime? Yeah, the bureaucrats have delayed this repair solution to a great degree. Right now on the books, there's 23-million man-hours of overtime existing. At the end of 2018, most French cops were admitting to pulling at least one shift of fourteen hours each week.
Third, the yellow vest crowd has been a thorn in the side of French political figures. Oddly, the cops have been drawn into this mess....to establish authority and put down the yellow vest folks. Most police will say that they have better things to do, but the protest rallies put demands on the police to put on the riot-gear, face hostile folks, and you might be putting in a 18-hour shift to make the political folks happy.
As for the Islamic converted-guy? It just stands out that desperation is a part of extremists in support of Islam. You get hyped-up, wanting to dish out retribution, and no logical thought mechanism steps in to say 'wait a minute'. In the end, you've got nothing much to live for.
What'll happen in this investigation of the police attack? In six months, they will close the case and just say the IT guy went 'nuts' and there's nothing anyone could have done about it. Police will shake their heads over the police investigation, and just start carrying their pistols everywhere, even inside the station itself.
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