Watch a short citizen’s video, listen to the sudden, pained cry of the young Black woman hit by a taser less than a metre from the police officer firing the gun, and then we can talk about police practice in the self-proclaimed birthplace of human rights. Not about “police violence” because President Emmanuel Macron has explained that would be wrong, very wrong. “Do not talk of repression or police violence, these words are unacceptable in a State of law,” were the ones he used in March 2019. It is, in France, the crime that must not be allowed to speak its name.
The video only takes 17 seconds, here. The link should work.
Ramatoulaye is 19 and a mother. She lives in Aubervilliers, the first suburb you come to as you go north across the Boulevard Périphérique around central Paris. Like many, she does not have a printer at home. She cannot just run off copies of Ministry of the Interior forms you need in France if you want to leave home during the Covid-19 confinement. So she had followed the official instruction for what to do in such circumstances and copied the document by hand. She then went shopping with her younger brother, aged just seven. They were stopped on the return journey. In the video, you can see the half-full shopping trolley to the left of the huddle of police.
