Reunion’s judicial police unit for minors, OFMIN, runs on 11 professionals serving an entire island, with just 4 of them posted in the south. Each investigator carries between 200 and 400 active cases. That is the operational reality at the center of a public dispute that erupted after former Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin sent a July 29 letter to current Interior Minister Laurent Nunez, criticizing how police handle sexual violence cases involving children. Le Monde first reported the letter.
The criticism landed badly on the island. Gilles Clain, national executive secretary of the Unité Police union, rejected Darmanin’s assessment outright. “His comments about my colleagues are scandalous and absurd. We don’t even understand why the Minister of Justice is taking it upon himself to evaluate the national police,” Clain said. His regional counterpart, Mickaël Hoareau of Unsa Police, was equally direct: “The problems he’s raising aren’t new within the police. He was the conductor at Place Beauvau for years. He had plenty of time to find solutions when he was in charge.”
Darmanin served as Interior Minister from July 2020 to September 2024. His letter cited failures in sensitive investigations, including the case of a young girl named Lyhanna whose situation drew national attention in May. Police representatives on the island do not dispute that failures occurred. What they dispute is who bears responsibility for the conditions that produced them.
The staffing numbers tell part of the story. The other part is training. Officers handling cases involving children must complete mandatory specialized instruction in how to communicate with and receive testimony from minors, a requirement that pulls investigators off active caseloads while they complete it. Hoareau described the operational bind: “This area is difficult. There are few volunteers, and they must be formally trained to receive and communicate with a minor. We have to construct an infraction using technical language but in a child’s words.” Necessary training, in other words, directly reduces the capacity available to process an already overwhelming caseload.
Technology compounds the problem. Investigators work on software that Hoareau described as obsolete, and Darmanin himself finalized the procurement process for it. “He could have changed it when he still had the authority,” Hoareau said. The system remains in place, slowing casework that is already constrained by staffing shortages and procedural requirements.
Clain pointed to a third bottleneck: the communication chain between police and prosecutors. “We’re blamed for everything, but often we try to contact the prosecutor’s office by email and phone and get no response.” Investigators cannot advance cases without authorization from senior investigators, creating a dependency on a command chain that sometimes stalls entirely. Clain’s broader frustration was pointed: “The former minister uses the police as a propaganda tool or for electoral purposes, hiding the real problems we face. We’re told to prioritize everything, drug trafficking, violence against minors, but the judicial procedure isn’t simplified. We can’t manage all of this under these conditions, and the victims are the ones who suffer.”
What the unions are asking for is procedural reform, specifically a simplification of judicial reporting requirements and faster digital communication between investigators and prosecutors. These changes, they argue, would return investigators to fieldwork rather than paperwork. More details on police discontent are available at https://imazpress.com/selection-de-la-redaction/police-mecontentement.
By contrast, Hoareau stopped short of calling for open conflict between the two ministries. “We need to try to see things optimistically. The problems are known. Now we need to give investigators and prosecutors the means to work. Opposing these two structures, as Darmanin does, isn’t helpful because we work hand in hand in the interest of victims.”
Nunez’s Investigation Plan, launched in March 2026, aims to integrate new technologies into judicial police operations and represents the current administration’s formal response to the infrastructure gaps. Recruitment at the national level, expanding the pool of investigators, prosecutors, specialized educators, and prevention workers, is the other half of what law enforcement says is needed. Whether the plan’s scope matches the scale of the caseload crisis on Reunion, where the gap between reported incidents and investigative capacity keeps widening, is the question that will define whether any of this amounts to more than a policy announcement.