Anxiously eyeing the upper floors of a tower block, the gendarme admitted: "I don't want to stay here long".
Why not?
"Someone might drop a washing machine on my head," he replied.
This comic-book image provoked an unstifled snigger.
But what France's Gendarmerie and police now face, according to their own Prime Minister, is operating on the front lines of decades of a failed philosophy of ethnic integration.
Major Denis Mottier is a combat veteran of Afghanistan. Now he's in L'Ariane, a suburb of Nice, dealing with crime and the steady infiltration of extreme Islamist ideology.
He explains that the area, which sits just two miles up an industrial valley from the centre of Nice, faces severe unemployment, drugs, and organised crime - a cocktail of misery that can feed the radicalisation of young people, especially immigrants.
In France, until about 10 days ago, there was no such thing as community.
No Tunisian community. No communities of Congolese, Senegalese, Chechens or Libyans.
France, it was deeply believed, had a unifying culture that was as indomitable as Asterix and inclusive of all.
"We have a different approach to Britain," said colonel Gael Marchand, the commander of the Gendarmerie for the Alpes-Maritime region.
"There you have multiculturalism. You have communities from all the immigrant groups. Differences are celebrated. Here we see everyone as French. Just French."
Partly derived from the French colonial approach which favoured assimilation of races over separation, the French mono-cultural view has been the bedrock of policy throughout the Fifth Republic.
Until Prime Minister Manuel Valls dropped an A-Bomb. He admitted the unthinkable.
France, he said, had become an apartheid state that had confined people to the urban fringes and excluded them from the mainstream of life because of their skin colour, their surnames or their sex.
The problems of immigrants in the banlieues were not new. Thousands rioted in 2005 after a group of young people died while allegedly being chased by police in Paris.
But the evolution of Islamo-fascism alongside the alienation of young men and women of immigrant stock has grown and born bloody fruit in the form of the Charlie Hebdo slaughter - killings carried out by men born French but feeling other.
Children in the Nice banlieues often drop out of school at 13. They are easy prey for radical preachers who have a political and theological explanation for why hope fades for many in their teens.
As in England and across Europe vulnerable young people are told they are "hated" by the indigenous communities and that the West is a decadent brothel-cum-casino that should be purged.
These arguments combined with the prospect of getting into gunfights and the thrill of Holy War, are powerful magnets that have drawn thousands from Europe to the ranks of terror groups in Syria.
Many dozens have travelled from Nice. Now 64 ghettos have been officially identified in across France. Six are around Nice, including L'Ariane.
Nearly half of young people living in them are unemployed and the average income is about €11,000 (£8,300) and more than half of families have a single parent.
So France has admitted it has a problem. It's just the solution that eludes the Republic - just as it does the United Kingdom.
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