FRENCH POLICE have defended their tactics during the removal of immigrant squatters from a makeshift encampment in a Paris suburb after an advocacy group released a video which it claimed showed officers using excessive force.
The video, which had been viewed online more than 500,000 times as of yesterday, shows riot police forcibly removing the squatters, including a pregnant woman, from the camp in La Courneuve. In one case, a woman with a baby on her back is shown being dragged along the ground by her legs.
Droit au Logement (DAL), a housing rights group, said it recorded and released the footage to show the excessive force used by police in “a particularly violent expulsion”. It said the incident occurred on July 21st but that the video was not posted online until it had been cleared by lawyers and some of the individuals involved.
MRAP, a leading human rights group, said people in the video had all been expelled from previous housing and provided with no long-term solutions. Jean-Baptiste Ayrault, spokesman for DAL, called for an investigation into the incident.
“There is clearly a limit [to what is acceptable],” he said. “Normally the police do not behave like this and I am afraid that we are seeing this kind of behaviour increasingly often.”
Responding to the criticism, the prefect for the Seine-Saint-Denis department said the squatters had physically resisted, “attaching themselves to each other, lying down, sometimes kicking and hitting police”. The eviction was handled “according to legal procedures and rules in such circumstances”, the prefect’s office said in a statement, and no one was injured during the removal of the 150 squatters.
The woman who was dragged along the ground “lay on her back despite the fact that the child was attached to her” and kicked at police officers as they tried to remove her, the statement continued. “Consequently, her child was not visible to the police officers who were around her.”
Interviewed by Le Parisien yesterday, the anonymous DAL activist who shot the video said he released it “to show the degree of violence used”.
The controversy over the Courneuve video comes amid an acrimonious debate about the government’s toughening rhetoric on crime and delinquency.
In a speech in Grenoble last week, President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke of a “war” on criminality and suggested that French citizenship should be withdrawn from anyone of foreign origin who threatened the life of a police officer. He also referred to “insufficiently regulated immigration over the past 50 years” and the “failure” of social integration.
By linking crime and immigration, the president’s speech provoked fury on the left.
Socialist party leader Martine Aubry said Mr Sarkozy’s comments represented “an anti-republican drift which damages France and its values” and showed he was panicking over his government’s failures.