French pension protests: Brav-M, the special police unit accused of brutality

FRANCE 24
Sun, 26 March 2023

© Geoffroy Van der Hasselt, AFP


They ride in pairs, are armed with handguns, expandable batons and tear gas grenades, and have been specially trained to prevent protests from spiralling out of control. But since France’s pension protests began, officers belonging to France’s special Brav-M motorbike unit have increasingly been accused of taking the law into their own hands, intimidating and threatening people, and in some cases, resorting to the use of excessive force.

On Friday, four days after Paris was the scene of one of the most violent demonstrations in years as hundreds of thousands of people thronged the streets to protest the government’s pension reform, French daily Le Monde and online video broadcaster Loopsider published a troubling audio recording.

In the nearly 20-minute-long clip, police officers are heard humiliating and menacing a young man, who claims to be from Chad, telling him that if they see him on the streets again “you won’t be getting into a police van to go to the station, you will be getting into something else, called an ambulance, and go to hospital”.

Two slaps can also be heard in the audio.

Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez immediately condemned the incident, calling the behaviour both “unacceptable” and unethical, telling French broadcaster France 5 that: “Like everyone else, I’m very shocked.”