Tag Archives: Police

Police brutality in France – it’s not that new

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The French police are the subject of much controversy these days. They have always faced a certain amount of opposition, sometimes of an extremely radical nature. Here’s an example from 110 years ago.

Jean-Jacques Liabeuf fights with the police, as reported in a contemporary newspaper

In 1910 a cobbler called Jean-Jacques Liabeuf went on a bar-crawl near Les Halles, then the site of the markets that kept Paris supplied with food. At his last port of call, just before 8.00am, Liabeuf brandished a knife with a 20-centimetre-long blade and announced that he was going to “rub out” at least two cops that day.

The police were duly called and two officers grabbed him as he left the establishment.

But they screamed with pain and let go of their target, who had wrapped leather sleeves packed with nails around his arms, concealing them beneath the cape he was wearing.

The weapons Liabeuf was carrying Source: Wikipedia

He than ran off to a neighbouring building, pursued by the police officers. There he stabbed one of them, Célestin Deray, eight times, drew a pistol and shot him in the chest and the stomach.  He stabbed the other, Constable Fournès, in the throat, also injuring three other cops who arrived before being himself stabbed with a sabre and taken to hospital. A crowd of onlookers had formed and tried to lynch him.

Deray died from his wounds.

Framed as a pimp

I came across this story on a fascinating Facebook page devoted to recounting aspects of the history of Paris through images.

A police photo of Jean-Jacques Liabeuf

Predictably, given the debate currently raging about law and order, the post inspired a number of comments along the lines of “People were already attacking law enforcement then”.

But another reader gave us an idea why Liabeuf was not too enamoured of the constabulary.

Born in Saint Etienne, he had come to the capital after serving several short prison sentences and being sent to fight in France’s colonial adventures in Africa.

In Paris he met and fell in love with Alexandrine Pigeon, a prostitute whose pimp, Gaston, was a police informer.

He was arrested, along with Alexandrine, by two members of the anti-prostitution police and after a trial which his lawyer did not bother to attend – he sent a message to the court that he was busy eating his lunch – jailed for three months for living off immoral earnings.

At the end of his sentence, Liabeuf breached an order not to return to Paris, was arrested and served another month in jail.

It was after that sentence that he came to Paris again, convinced that he had been fitted up and determined to avenge himself on the cops who had sent him down. He did not find them and Deray and Fournès paid the price of protecting their colleagues.

Riot in the shadow of the guillotine

Unsurprisingly, Liabeuf was condemned to death. But, at a time when police were used against striking furniture-makers and railworkers, his case became a cause célèbre for the French left, with radical papers pointing to the injustice of his previous conviction and the apparent corruption of the officers who arrested him.

The funeral of anarchist Henri Cler, killed during a clash with police during a furniture-makers’ strike in 1910

President Armand Fallières having rejected a petition calling for Liabeuf’s pardon, a crowd of about 10,000 – including Lenin, Picasso and French socialist leader Jean Jaurès – turned out on the morning he was due to be guillotined.

A number of demonstrators were arrested or injured in clashes with the police and, after an anarchist shot a cop while trying to free Liabeuf to the cheers of the crowd, the prefect sent in the cavalry, with sabres drawn. The wounded police officer, part of a brigade specially devoted to tracking anarchists, later died.

So the police were not particularly popular with those sections of the population most likely to be on the receiving end of their attentions, often perceived as using arbitrary violence in defence of an unjust social order.

Police station attacked

That’s also true today.

The only police station in Champigny-sur-Marne, where I live, has been attacked three times, twice this year and nationwide the number of attacks on police rose 14% in the first nine months of this year.

https://twitter.com/LeCapricieux94/status/1315050472810708994?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1315050472810708994%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.francetvinfo.fr%2Ffaits-divers%2Fpolice%2Fchampigny-sur-marne-un-commissariat-attaque-dans-la-nuit-par-une-quarantaine-de-personnes_4137345.html

Some 96 officers are reported to have been injured at a demonstration against the government’s proposed security law last Saturday.

But, then again, so were a number of demonstrators and journalists at that protest and at a violent police raid on an improvised migrants’ camp last Tuesday. They have not received a phone call from Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who says he has spoken to most of the injured cops.

And so was Michel Zecler, a black music producer, beaten and racially insulted by police who followed him into his studio in Paris last week, apparently with the intention of fining him for failing to wear an anti-Covid mask.

Michel Zecler after his encounter with police in Paris

And so were about 30 people who lost either an eye or a hand during the Gilets jaunes demonstrations in 2018, nor the demonstrators clubbed or teargassed on protests against changes to labour law in 2016, not to mention an ever-growing number of banlieue residents, usually belonging to racial minorities, who have been insulted, chased or beaten by the forces of the law.

Many of these assaults came to light because they were filmed, a procedure the government, under pressure from right-wing police unions, means to make more difficult with the controversial article 24 of its security bill.

Here’s an illustration of why that is a bad idea.

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Coronavirus diary day 87 – France’s history of racist policing, toppling statues and doves in Afghanistan

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Worldwide protests over the murder of George Floyd have given a new boost to campaigns against police brutality and racism in France. Ministers have promised action, while insisting that “France is not the United States”. But official France is still in denial over the nature and extent of the phenomenon.

In 1986 I came to France to take part in the massive marches that followed the death of Malik Oussekine, a student of Algerian origin who was killed by police during demonstrations against a right-wing government’s proposed education reform.

It was December and I remember the cold, the crowds and sleeping in a small flat in Belleville along with a crowd of other agitators from various European countries, there, like me, to convert the French to our view of how to fight racism and change the world. Our efforts were not rewarded with great success.

One night a group of us were arrested by cops on motorbikes, one of whom sported a very striking moustachewith waxed points and was particularly indignant about our attempt to flypost the walls of a bank.

We spent most of the night at the commissariat, pretending not to understand French, which wasn’t that far from the truth, and thus avoiding answering questions. The moustachioed cop was furious when his boss decided not to charge us and kicked us out onto the street, to find our way back to base as daylight broke on the boulevards.

The outrage that met Malik Oussekine’s death led to the education minister resigning and his education bill being dropped.

Two of the three cops who beat Oussekine, members of a motorbike squad like the ones who arrested us, were tried and found guilty of involuntary homicide. But they only received suspended sentences and, although disciplinary action was taken against both of them, one continued to work in the police force.

“After this parody of a trial … I have come to realise that in the country where I was born I will always be a second-class citizen,” Malik’s sister, Sarah, commented.

Shortly after I came to live in France, in 1993, a report appeared in the newspapers of a woman who spent the night in the cells after accusing a police officer of racism while he checked a young man’s identity papers.

A little later young black man died in detention in the police station near where I lived in Montmartre. There was a small protest march past the scene of his death but no great scandal.

Since then the deaths of youths from racial minorities have led to many protests and, on some occasions, riots, most notably in 2005 when the banlieue exploded nationwide after two teenagers were electrocuted while fleeing a police patrol.

Recently cops were caught on video racially abusing and maltreating an Egyptian migrant who had jumped in the river to escape their attentions. And the media have uncovered two Facebook groups where several thousand “guardians of the peace” shared racist and sexist comments, several revealing a certain amount of sexual insecurity and one coining the interesting slogan “Make Normandie Viking again”.

According to one study, 54% of police officers voted for Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 presidential election.

This journalist’s tweet shows cops sporting far-right symbols while on duty.

France’s government-appointed rights defender, Jacques Toubon, a former right-wing justice minister who has taken his job far more seriously than many people expected him to, has called for records to be kept of identity checks by the police.

In a 2016 study his commission found that 80% of the blacks and Arabs interviewed were 20 times more likely to be checked than white people.

Toubon has just opened an investigation into the case of Gabriel, a 14-year-old Roma who claims to have sustained serious injuries to the left eye when he was kicked in the head after being detained for stealing a scooter.

Last month he delivered a report that found institutional racism in police treatment of a group of 18 youths, “black or Arab or pereceived as being so”, in a Paris district.

As he approaches the end of his term, he may wish to turn his attention to the case of four families in the Val-de-Marne town of Vitry-sur-Seine who have just filed complaints over the arbitrary arrest and racial abuse suffered by their 14-15-year-old sons last month. One of the boys hopes to become a police officer.

All of which would seem to imply that when mainstream-right politician Damien Abad denies there is institutional racism in the police force, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner accuses actress and singer Camélia Jordana of “shameful lies” when she says she doesn’t feel safe when faced with a cop or Prime Minister Edouard Philippe declares that the overwhelming majority of officers of the law are not racist, they do not have tremendous respect for empirical evidence.

Castaner this week responded to the latest protests against police brutality with a ban on chokeholds, an order that police oficers suspected of racism be suspended while an inquiry takes place, and a promise to make internal investigations more independent.

Despite Castaner’s assurance that “France is not the United States” and “there are no racist institutions or targeted violence”, that sent police unions into a lather of indignation, which ministers greeted with a frenzy of appeasement.

Maybe not all French coppers are bastards, though. A young participant in one of the Facebook groups complained that none of the women at his police station would go out with him if he revealed his fascist sympathies.

Much kerfuffle about the toppling of the statue of a Tory slave-trader in Bristol last weekend.

I seem to remember certain moments when knocking down statues was widely hailed as a Good Thing, in Iraq in 2003, for example, or in eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A statue of Saddam Hussein is toppled in Iraq in 2003

Read my account of Iraq after Saddam’s fall here.

Members of the French government have assured us that the statue of Colbert, the minister under Louis XIV who drew up the Code noire, the legal framework for slavery in French colonies, will remain in place.

In world virus news, over 1,000 doves are reported to have died in Mazar-e-Sharif, the north Afghan city that is home to a beautiful mosque where they nest on the roof.

Doves in front of the mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif Photo: Tony Cross

They have starved to death because lockdown has meant nobody is feeding them, as they were when I visited the city in 2009.

Lockdown has meant that some 30 doves die every day, according to the mosque’s imam Photo: Tony Cross

Legend has it that they flock there because the mosque was built at the site of the tomb of Ali, the prophet Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law. His body is said to have been put on a camel that walked to the city and then died there. Historians do not agree with this account.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 29,319, up 23 in 24 hours. 11,678 people are in hospital, down 283, with 933 patients in intensive care, down 22. 71,832 people have been discharged from hospital, 326 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 79 – Black lives matter in France, too

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Who’d have thought anything could push a global pandemic out of the lead story spot? Well, a nine-minute video of a US cop murdering a black man has and it’s sparked protests around the world. In Paris yesterday an estimated 20,000 people defied a ban on protests to link the killing to French police racism.

But stop! There’s none of that there here! Not according to Paris Préfet de Police Didier Lallement, who is concerned that such an accusation has hurt the feelings of his troops.

The Paris police force “is not violent, nor racist: it acts within the framework of the right to liberty for all”, he claimed in an email to the capital’s 27,500 cops.

The family of Adama Traoré beg to differ. They organised yesterday’s demo four years after his death in police custody.

Three official reports have cleared the three cops who pinned him to the ground. But a counter-inquiry commissioned by the family on Tuesday blamed their robust technique of detention.

Thanks to the family’s persistence, Traoré’s case has become a focus for “accusations of violence and racism, repeated endlessly by social networks and certain activist groups”, as Lallement puts it.

Regular deaths and injuries in the banlieue, along with videos of racial abuse and brutality, tend to bear those accusations out.

Some French people can get a little self-righteous about racism in the US. After all, wasn’t this the country where black GIs found welcome relief from the Jim Crow South at the end of World War II and where artists like Miles Davis and James Baldwin came to breathe freer creative air?

But they had the advantages of not being from former colonies or living on deprived estates in the banlieue.

“I realise that the Algerian is the nigger in Paris,” Baldwin commented after spending some time here.

Traoré’s family came to France from Mali, a former French colony in sub-Saharan Africa.

Back to the virus. Yesterday was the beginning of phase 2 of post-lockdown.

In Champigny the market had already opened, in a depleted form and the shoppers turned out, mostly wearing masks, and met up with friends

.

Some of the cafés had employed a flexible interpretation of the rules by offering drinks “to take away” under phase 1.

In Ile de France, which is the last orange for not-too-good area left in the country, they can now serve en terasse but not Inside.

Schoolkids and the un- or undereployed are sunning themselves on the banks of the Marne, or even on the river itself.

My afternoon walk took me to the former Pathé studios at Joinville-le-Pont, now a collection of workplaces, some apparently still linked to the film industry, and flats.

They were once frequented by Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Jean Renoir and other luminaries. They drank in the guingettes, the restaurants along the riverside, and added some glamour to this town on the outskirts of Paris.

Our late neighbour, Claude, was a house painter. He worked on the site once and told me they had conveyor belts going across it to transport the film and special double doors to prevent light entering the processing laboratories.

The 1946 film Les Portes de la Nuit was partly filmed there. This shot is a reconstruction of the overhead metro at La Chapelle in Paris, the set designed by Alexandre Trauner.

Trauner was a Hungarian who fled the far-right, anti-Semitic Horthy regime in 1929 and left a photographic record of the streets of Paris in the 1930s due to his research for his work. Here’s one of his preparatory sketches for another film, Le Jour se lève.


Asylum-seekers, eh?

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 28,940, 107 in 24 hours. 14,208 people are in hospital, down 260 yesterday, 1,253 patients are in intensive care, down 49, and 68,812 have been discharged, 372 in 24 hours.

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Coronavirus diary day 52 – Warnings of second wave as France prepares to end lockdown

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The man in charge of guiding us out of lockdown has a relockdown plan up his sleeve, which is not reassuring. Nor are the findings of two studies that a second wave seems quite likely.

Jean Castex, the civil servant and right-wing politician who has been made Monsieur Déconfinement, has a reconfinement plan ready in case things go wrong, the AFP news agency reports.

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe is to announce details of the phased withdrawal from lockdown today. Some of the details that have been discussed so far have proved controversial, particularly the proposal to send some kids back to school.

Noting that there has been some lowering of preventive standards in recent days, Castex has warned that things can go wrong if people become too relaxed about anti-virus precautions.

The findings of two studies are not encouraging.

One, under the auspices of the Paris hospitals authority, has some good news. The widespread use masks – you know, those things the government said we didn’t really need a few weeks ago – combined with social distancing should reduce the risk of infection by 75%.

But that’s not enough for those at high risk – over-65s and people with pre-existing conditions like diabetes, hypertension and obesity. Unless they keep out of danger, the hospitals will be overwhelmed by mid-July, it finds, and there will be 87,100 deaths, instead of 33,500, between May and December.

By then herd immunity should have been reached, it adds, which I suppose is some sort of consolation, although we still don’t know if you can be reinfected.

The other study, also by Paris-based experts, predicts that reopening schools will probably lead to “a second wave similar to the one recently experienced” unless “maximum attendance is limited to 50% for both younger children and adolescents”.

A leap in infections can only be avoided if 50% of the population stay at home, ie most people continue to work from home, if the elderly come into contact with 75% fewer people than they would normally do, and if there is only a 50% rise in the number of shops reopening and other public activity, the study finds.

There also needs to be enough testing, tracing and isolation to identify 50% of cases and the human resources to carry this out, the study warns.

Two cops have been jailed and another given a suspended sentence for battering an Afghan refugee in Marseille, then whisking him off and dumping 30 kilometres away.

The senior officer, 46-year-old Michel Provenzano, was sent down for four years, longer than the three years the public prosecutor had called for. New recruit, 26-year-old Mathieu Coelho, was sentenced to 18 months, while a colleague, described in reports as “a young woman”, was given one year suspended.

The team stopped 27-year-old Jamshed S on the Old Port on suspicion of spitting on two people who had refused to give him cigarettes.

Annoyed by being subjected to “invective in Afghan” (!) and being given the finger, the “guardians of the peace”, as the French like to call police officers, got him in a half nelson and threw him against their van.

“That’s when Michel started to get annoyed,” Coelho testified.

They handcuffed him and took him to the woods at Châteauneuf-les-Martigues, where Provenzano slapped and punched him and broke his mobile phone. Then they drove off, leaving him there.

Well, at least the brigadier left his gun and sunglasses in the glove box, “so as not to do anything stupid”.

Another court this week heard the cases of youths arrested during the urban violence in Clichy-la-Garenne that followed the injury of a youth apparently knocked off his motorbike by the door of a police car.

Asked to explain what they were doing on the street after midnight, one defendant said he was going to see his grandfather, “who never answers his phone”, and two said they were going to get cigarettes.

“Clearly in Clichy people have an irresistible urge to smoke at night,” commented the magistrate.

“Do people do anything in the daytime in Clichy?” she wanted to know, after another defendant said he was on his way to the shop. “Do you all wait till 1.00am to go shopping?”

“There aren’t so many people at night,” replied Makram S.

“Given the testimony in this case, that’s open to question,” was her honour’s response.

Another philosophical question: What do you think of this tweet?

Personally, I haven’t been appealing to any gods during the epidemic.

But I do often invent my own superstitions – “If I do this right, then such-and-such desired outcome will take place” – and can’t help reciting “One for sorrow, two for joy” etc to myself every time I see magpies (it’s a British thing).

If you’re religious, you will probably take this as evidence that we non-believers recognise the truth of God’s – or gods’ – existence in spite of ourselves.

I think it proves that man created god.

We bargain with the Lord, touch wood or count magpies when faced with problems we feel helpless to resolve. That’s the same reason our ancestors, living in a world that could deprive them of food, shelter and loved ones on an apparent caprice, invented deities to intervene on their behalf against the vagaries of nature.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at  25,809, up 278 in the past 24 hours. 23,983 people are in hospital, down 792 yesterday, with 3,147 in intensive care, down 283. 53,972 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,236 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 43 – The police, the banlieue and lockdown

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As the nation awaits this afternoon’s announcement on the end of lockdown, the main news stories are back to the old abnormal – police brutality and a possible terror attack.

The most recent story is an attack on police in Colombes, near Paris. Yesterday afternoon a man drove a BMW at speed at police checking traffic, injuring two of them, one seriously, and crushing a police motorbike against a police car.

He has a police record for criminal activity about 10 years ago but was not on the national terror watch list.

The attacker reportedly told arresting officers that he was inspired to attack the police after watching videos of the situation in Gaza and that he wanted to die a martyr.

The case has not yet been classified a terror attack but may be.

On Sunday, at 2.00am to be precise, police were allegedly caught on video appearing to racially abuse a man in a scene that is followed by banging and screams.

The man is reported to have jumped into the Seine while trying to flee the police. After catching him, they appear to mock him, using a racial insult reserved for north Africans, and suggesting that the colleague who caught him should have weighed him down rather than fished him out of the river.

Later, although it is dark, one can hear the van doors slam, thuds, and what seem to be screams and laughter.

The video, reportedly filmed by a local resident, was put online by Taha Bouhafs, the journalist and activist who broke the story of presidential security guard Alexandre Benalla’s assault of demonstrators during a May Day demonstration in 2018.

Since then he has had his troubles with the police, being violently arrested while filming an undocumented workers’ protest in the Val-de-Marne in 2019 and charged with “outrage”, a catch-all accusation often levelled against people found insufficiently cooperative by the forces of law and order.

After he made the name of the arresting officer public, a police trade union published a graphic accusing him of having rabies and stirring up “anti-cop hatred”.

An inquiry into the alleged assault on Bouhafs was launched.

He was arrested again in 2020 after tweeting the news that the president was in the audience of a play he was watching.

The tweet prompted a small group of opponents of the government’s pension reform to descend on the theatre and try to enter, leading to Macron being forced to leave.

Bouhafs was detained on leaving the show, accused of planning acts of violence and vandalism and participation in an unauthorised demonstration.

Lockdown has done nothing to improve relations between the banlieue and the police, who are accused of using the extra powers it has given them as extra excuses to harass people in deprived areas.

Last week there was urban violence in Seine Saint Denis after a motorcyclist’s leg was broken when he hit the open door of a police car. He has admitted speeding but denies knowing it was a police car.

And in Champigny, as I mentioned in an earlier post, a home-made mortar was fired at the police station.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 23,293, 437 in the past 24 hours. 28,055 patients are in hospital, down 162 yesterday, and 4,608 are in intensive care, down 74. 45,513 people have been discharged from hospital.

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Macron minister in French farce after false May Day demo claim

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France’s minister for machismo, Christophe Castaner, has covered himself in ridicule by falsely claiming that a group of demonstrators attacked a hospital during this week’s May Day demonstration in Paris.

Police stop demonstrators by the Pitié Salpêtrière hospital

Castaner, a former Socialist who lobbied hard to become interior minister in the Macron government after another Socialist defector, Gérard Collomb, ducked out, has seized on any pretext to try to discredit protests against the government, whether they be the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), the trade unions or the left.

On May Day they all marched together and Castaner’s twitter finger was clearly itching. Before the day was out he had announced that a group of demonstrators had “attacked” the famous Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, assaulted a member of the hospital staff and forced entry into the resuscitation unit.

Unfortunately for Monsieur le Ministre, hospital staff denied his version of events and video shot at the scene showed demonstrators fleeing teargas and stun grenades fired by the police. They had blocked a section of the demonstration from advancing towards the Place d’Italie, as their colleagues came to grips with demonstrators further up the road (see my account of those events here).

Thirty-four demonstrators were arrested and detained for nearly 30 hours but then released without charge.

On Sunday they presented a joint statement to the media, complaining of Castaner’s attempts to exploit their case for political purposes and thanking the hospital staff who came forward to give an accurate account of what had gone on.

Castaner is one of a long line of Socialist defectors who seem to believe they must prove some sort of political manhood by declaring their undying love for the police and all their works.

The now utterly unloved Manuel Valls, who was interior minister before becoming prime minister and is currently a soon-to-be unsuccessful mayoral candidate in Barcelona, suffered from the same syndrome.

By coincidence, today I read an account of German Social Democrat Gustav Noske’s suppression of the 1919 “Spartakist uprising” in Berlin.

“Someone must play the bloodhound I will not shirk my duty,” he declared as he led the Freikorps into the city to massacre over 1,000 rebels and assassinate Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Formally dissolved in 1921, the Freikorps were the soil from which the Nazi militias and the Waffen-SS grew.

The Nazis later booted Noske out of his minister’s position and he retired from politics after Hitler became German chancellor. He was arrested by the Nazis in 1937 but released after a few months, only to be detained again in 1944 after the attempt on Hitler’s life.

He was interned in Fürstenberg/Havel concentration camp, then in Ravensbrück, before being transferred to Berlin’s Lehrter Strasse priso, from which he was liberated by Soviet troops in May 1945.

Be careful what demons you unleash!

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