Les Cops Sportif

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

French law enforcement.

There are basically three sorts of French police officers on the national level, as well as municipal forces:

  • National Gendarmerie (Gendarmerie Nationale): A part of the Gauls With Grenades, this military police force essentially covers the French countryside and small towns. They wear kepis. The riot control role is shared by the Gendarmerie Mobile units, which, as their name implies, are part of the Gendarmerie.
  • Directorate-General of Customs and Indirect Taxes (Direction générale des douanes et droits indirects or DGDDI)
  • National Police (Police Nationale, better known under their old name: Sûreté Nationale): Cover towns and cities.
    • Also includes the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS), essentially France's riot police. Both the CRS and Gendarmerie Mobile have cool Robocop-dubbed suits to better withstand the various projectiles thrown at them by demonstrators.
    • A lot of people considers the Gendarmes Mobiles to be the upgraded, more violent version of the CRS.
    • The GIGN (Groupe d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, National Gendarmerie Intervention Group) is considered the most elite group, and is only dispatched in extreme cases (assault with hostages, terrorism... Their most well-known operation is the Air France Flight 8969 hostage situation, where a group planning a 9/11-like terrorist attack was wiped out without losing any hostages during the assault). They also have a strict concealment of identity policy. While the GIGN is part of the Army, the police have their own SWAT Teams: the GIPN (Groupe d'Intervention de la Police Nationale, National Police Intervention Group) has teams in every large city. When things go really south (for example, the Neuilly hostage situation of 1993, where a man known as "Human Bomb" took a whole preschool class hostage), the police resort to the Up to Eleven version of the GIPN, the RAID (Recherche, Assistance, Intervention, Dissuasion, Research, Assistance, Intervention, Deterrence).
Examples of Les Cops Sportif include:


Film

  • The Bourne Identity
  • Taken
  • La Haine ("hatred"), another French movie.
  • The Pink Panther and other films featuring Inspector Clouseau.
  • Banlieue 13.
  • Un Flic - Flic being French for, roughly, "Cop" - is a character study of a dour, serious police officer and a flamboyant, brilliant criminal (played by Richard Crenna, famous for the Rambo movies). It's way Better Than It Sounds.
  • Bob Le Flambeur, a Caper movie about robbing a Casino, has an Inspector Javert type pursuing the title character. In the end, Bob gets away clean because he never actually comitted the heist, instead hitting a lucky streak at the gaming tables that made him more than he would have if he'd played his part. His partners, unfortunately, don't know this and get gunned down pointlessly.
  • Just about any movie directed by Olivier Marchal, a former cop. Department 36 remains his most critically acclaimed movie.


Literature

  • The Crimson Rivers (Les rivières pourpres in the original French) is a novel and film featuring a team-up between a gendarme and detective from the National Police.
  • Members of the Maritime Gendarmerie feature prominently in the Young Bond short story "A Hard Man to Kill".


Live Action TV

  • "Good moaning". Sort of.
  • Recurs several times in the Paris half of various Highlander the Series seasons, especially season 1.
  • Engrenages (Spiral in the UK, the French title meaning "cogs"), a French series which has aired in the United Kingdom.


Video Games

  • The final level of Hitman Contracts requires Agent 47 to escape a GIGN assault on his hotel chamber.
  • Modern Warfare 3 has the GIGN as allies in the campaign and as a playable faction in the multiplayer.
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