This interests me (in a slightly off-topic way): do the soldiers really switch their service weapons to a semi-automatic model in order to patrol, or are all the rifles within the military police (etc.) semi-automatic only?
Most military rifles are semi-automatic. Even with a fairly tame AR style rifle using automatic fire makes it a little harder to quickly engage targets and the recoil can be a little un-predictable even when just using burst fire.
In short most military rifles are single shot due to the fact that you may engage targets out to a few hundred yard to a couple of meters.
tldr; Automatic rifles for military applications, not all that great.
It's not military police, it's just plain ol' soldiers. Which kinda freaks me out, because I spend my time wondering exactly what their rules of engagement are, and how well they have been trained in them. At least they always have the safety engaged when I check...
Solders for the most part get much more time and training using firearms than police who tend to have a much wider range of duties to perform.
Most NATO militaries have increased the amount of training in urban environments. I'm pretty sure(or overly optimistic) they have decent training/drilling experience as the political backlash from having soldiers get way to aggressive in terms of resorting to military tactics vs police tactics.
They are much better marksmen, it's true. But police have waaaaaay more experience dealing with drunk idiots, mentally ill people, people doped up to their eyeballs on speed and so on. Deciding whether someone is one of these or a serious security threat is not as easy as it might sound, hence my curiousity vis-a-vis the rules of engagement...
The Australian military is generally lauded as being excellent at peace-keeping operations, yet during officer training, it was hammered into us that policing was a much harder operation, and that our hierarchy would never accept policing missions.
I suspect that you're mistaken on what semi-automatic means. Basically all of the rifles likely to be carried by law enforcement are semi-automatic, except for sharp-shooters, who my carry a single-shot with a floated barrel.
Semi-automatic is not automatic, and has no burst or rapid-fire mechanisms. All semi-automatic rifles shoot one bullet for each pull of the trigger, and in 2015, that's the norm for just about every patrol rifle in the world, except for those needing long-range accuracy, which is a fairly niche application nowadays.
The comment I responded to said that in addition to law enforcement, it's common for soldiers to patrol the streets, too, at times.
If I had to guess, I'd say they would prefer using the weapons they are accustomed to, which are probably not the same that LEO's use. Now I don't know much about the French military, but where I come from, I doubt the military even has appreciable amounts of semi-automatic rifles, as even the military police always use the same assault rifle everybody else does.
Just for clarification's sake, the rifles in question carried by the French army are almost certainly automatic-capable, but like most military organisations around the world, I would expect them to be configured in semi-automatic mode, as you will run through a full clip of ammunition in two short bursts if you're in automatic mode, and that will mostly be a waste of ammunition, unless you find yourself confronted with a massed charge. It would be difficult to believe that they weren't configured in semi-automatic mode in a friendly-territory urban setting!
Ah, my apologies. I read the comment backwards from what it was, so thanks for the clarification.
That said, I have no idea what the French Miliary use. I would guess a lot of H&K stuff. In the U.S. at least, swapping out from an M16 to an AR-15 is pretty natural, but I have no way of knowing what the transition is from or to in France.
In short most military rifles are single shot due to the fact that you may engage targets out to a few hundred yard to a couple of meters.
tldr; Automatic rifles for military applications, not all that great.