4 French police who ‘beat black man’ charged

FOUR French police officers were charged yesterday over the beating and racial abuse of a black music producer, a case that has outraged France and ramped up pressure on the French government to give ground on a controversial security bill.

The assault of Michel Zecler which was exposed in video footage published last week has become a new rallying cause for critics who accuse the police of institutionalized racism and brutality.

French President Emmanuel Macron summoned Cabinet ministers and parliamentary leaders to a crisis meeting yesterday to rapidly produce “suggestions to reestablish confidence” between the police and the population.

The new security law would restrict the right of the press as well as social media users to publish images of on- duty police.

Rallies against the law mobilized tens of thousands at the weekend, with dozens wounded during clashes with police in Paris.

A Paris investigating magistrate yesterday charged all four officers with assault by a person holding public authority. Three were also charged with fabricating their statement on the incident.

Two of the accused, including the most senior officer, a brigadier aged 44, will remain behind bars but the other two were freed on conditional release.

On Sunday, Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz called for three of the officers to be also charged with racial abuse.

He said that the officers had acknowledged that their use of force was unjustified, but that they claimed they had acted in “fear” and “panic,” and denied any racist abuse.

The four had good service records, Heitz added.

Zecler had been stopped for not wearing a mask and for a strong smell of cannabis. A tiny quantity of the substance was found.

Commentators said the images of the beating, which were first published by the Loopsider news site, might never have been made public if the contentious Article 24 of the security legislation had been in force.

The bill would criminalize publishing images of on- duty police with the intent of harming their “physical or psychological integrity.”

The proposed law is partly a response to demands from police unions, who say it will provide greater protection for officers.

Abdoulaye Kante, a Black police officer with 20 years of experience in Paris and its suburbs, is both a supporter of the proposed law and strongly condemns police brutality and violence against officers.

“What people don’t understand is that some individuals are using videos to put the faces of our (police) colleagues on social media so that they are identified, so that they are threatened or to incite hatred,” he said.

“The law doesn’t ban journalists or citizens from filming police in action ... It bans these images from being used to harm, physically or psychologically,” he argued.

“The lives of officers are important.”

Critics says the legislation is further evidence of a slide to the right by Macron, who came to power in 2017 as a centrist promising a liberal overhaul.

“The president is caught in a trap,” said the headline in the French left-leaning newspaper Liberation Daily.

“The government prefers to let the situation decay rather than withdraw Article 24.”