Vice World News: France Is Set to Explode With Anger Over Police Brutality

June 11, 2021

PARIS – Boubacar Dramé thought he was going to die. He remembers the cops digging their knees into his neck, struggling for breath, gulping desperately for air.

Eleven months before a video of George Floyd’s death set off a global wave of anti-racism and Black Lives Matter protests and marches, Dramé says he was the victim of police brutality, in an incident caught in multiple videos, that took place in broad daylight in a Paris suburb.

The disturbing footage shows two plainclothes officers pinning Dramé down with their knees, as bystanders film, loudly protesting the use of force, and trying to tell the cops that Dramé works for the city as a local youth worker and community organiser, and is well known in Gennevillers.

Just a few minutes before, Dramé had met a distraught mother on the street who said she had lost her young daughter, and was able to help reunite them. He had however initially asked someone else to call the cops to report a missing child and when approached by a man identifying himself as police, mistakenly believed he was responding to the call.

But the first officer said he was conducting a routine ID check, something resembling stop-and-search in the UK or stop-and-frisk in the US, which police in France perform regularly in predominantly Black and low-income communities. In an official complaint, Dramé says that the situation escalated significantly with the arrival of a second officer, who without a word proceeded to pat him down aggressively and put his hands in his pockets.

Dramé pleaded with the cops for more discretion, concerned that the underprivileged young people he worked with in the community could be watching. But they slammed his body to the ground, according to the official complaint filed with a French police watchdog that investigates police conduct, seen by VICE World News. He was told to “stop talking like that, it doesn’t suit you,” Dramé says in the documents, which also accuse the officers of discrimination.

At various points during the arrest, officers pulled on his beard and dug a key into Dramé’s ribs, the documents say. While pushing him into the unmarked police car, out of view of the camera, Dramé alleges that one of the officers put his hand between his legs and crushed his testicles. 

More at https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dbdj8/france-is-set-to-explode-with-anger-over-police-brutality