Paris police on Wednesday admitted major gaps in the Louvre’s defenses, turning this month’s horrifying daylight robbery into a national showdown about how France protects its priceless cultural treasures.
Paris police chief Patrice Faure told the French Senate that aging systems and slow implementation of necessary repairs have left the world’s most visited museum with critical security weaknesses.
“No technological leap has been made,” he said, noting that parts of the video network are even still analog and produce lower-quality images that are slow to share in real time.
The long-promised overhaul — a $93 million project requiring roughly 60 kilometers of new wiring — “will not be completed until 2029-2030,” Faure added.
A preliminary report revealed that one of the three rooms in the area of the attacked museum had no CCTV cameras, according to French media.
The Paris police chief also revealed that the Louvre’s operating authorization for its security cameras had quietly expired in July and had not been renewed. The administrative oversight is seen by some as a symptom of wider negligence after thieves pryed open a window to the Apollo Gallery, used power tools to cut into display cases and fled with eight pieces of France’s crown jewels within minutes while tourists were inside.
Faure said that while officers arrived extremely quickly, the delay occurred much earlier in the chain of detection: from the initial sensors, to museum security, to 911, and finally to police headquarters.
According to Faure, the first alert to the police did not come from the Louvre’s own internal alarms, but from a cyclist outside who telephoned the emergency services after spotting men wearing helmets using a basket lift.
He rejected calls for immediate, simple solutions. He rejected proposals for a permanent police post at the palace-museum, warning it would set an unworkable precedent and be ineffective against fast-moving mobile crime squads. “I am fundamentally opposed,” he declared. “The problem isn’t the patrol at the door, it’s speeding up the emergency chain.”
Instead, he called on politicians to enable tools that are currently banned: using AI-based anomaly detection and object tracking (not facial recognition) to flag suspicious movements and track scooters or devices on city camera networks in real time.
Custody limit of suspects
Two people were detained over the weekend, one of whom was caught at Charles-de-Gaulle airport while trying to flee France. Under French laws governing organized theft, police detention of suspects is strictly limited to 96 hours. That key deadline expires late Wednesday, forcing prosecutors to either formally charge the individuals, release them or secure a judge’s order for an extension, the Associated Press reported.
The Louvre estimates the value of the eight missing pieces at around $102 million, although it has not yet been confirmed that any have been recovered.
