Five police officers were seriously injured around midday on Sunday 9 August on a departmental road north of Perpignan, in the Pyrenees-Orientales, after a driver refused to stop. None of their lives is in danger. One has a broken collarbone and another damage to the cervical vertebrae. The driver left the scene on foot and is still being actively sought.
The sequence, as described by L'Independant and by Marc Defrenes of the Alliance Police Nationale union speaking to RMC, began with a routine stop. Officers saw a driver using a telephone at the wheel and moved to pull him over. He appeared to comply, began lowering his window, then accelerated away. Officers deployed a stop stick, the barred device thrown across the road to deflate tyres. With several police vehicles alerted by radio and closing in, the driver turned around and took the hard shoulder against the traffic. He then braked hard, forcing the pursuing cars to brake, and the first police vehicle went into the back of the second. Defrenes said the crew understood they were going to hit, that they were doing 80 kilometres an hour, and that they were badly frightened.
The detail that deserves attention is that the injuries were caused by one police car hitting another, not by the fleeing vehicle striking anyone. That is not unusual. In most pursuit casualties the harm comes from the dynamics the pursuit itself creates, which is exactly why pursuit policy in France and elsewhere is built around continuous risk assessment and the authority to call the chase off. A driver braking suddenly on a hard shoulder is using that dynamic deliberately.
The union's response was to say that beyond the material damage, officers had once again been exposed to violence and danger that is unacceptable in the course of their duties, and to express the hope that those responsible are arrested quickly and that the courts treat the matter with the seriousness it deserves. The demand for a proportionate judicial response is one police unions make consistently, and refus d'obtemperer has become one of the sharper points of that argument in recent years.
It is worth keeping the frame accurate while the man is at large. Nobody has been arrested and nobody has been charged. What is established is that a driver stopped for a phone offence chose to flee, that the manner of his flight put five officers in hospital, and that a police vehicle is a write-off on a road north of Perpignan.