Thursday November 14, 11 p.m., Stade de France, Saint-Denis (93) – Whistle. In the middle of the 4,000 police officers deployed around the stadium, the demonstrators in support of Palestine present to protest against the France-Israel match turned back. Suddenly, the anti-crime squad (BAC) jumps on three young men who are joining the station RER B. Léo, 25 years old, is grabbed by the neck and violently pushed with Maxime and Samir (1), 22 and 23 years old, against the station gates by four plainclothes agents. “My first instinct is to think that they are fafs,” believes Léo, author-screenwriter. The blues are immediately joined by half a dozen of their colleagues. They search their pockets and throw their things on the ground, one tears off Leo's hat. Another opens Maxime's jacket, revealing his sweater with “Antifascist Action” on it, which he tries to take off. Immediately, the insults begin to rain down:
“All I see in front of me are three bitches. »
The testimony of the trio is identical. However, they do not know each other and have just met during a police check shortly before. They all recount in detail the flood of insults, humiliations and threats uttered for nearly 15 minutes by the police officers of the BAC. Maxime remembers:
“A police officer comes within 5 centimeters of my face and says to me: “I want to crush you.” »
The oldest in particular, the “leader” according to Samir, multiplies the homophobic attacks, insulting them as “little sluts”, “fags”, “suckers”. When Léo tries to reassure a fourth controlled man, visibly distressed and speaking French poorly, by touching his arm, the attacks start up again: “Why are you touching him? Do you want to suck it? ” Next to, a police officer allegedly strutted around with a Palestinian-colored jersey taken from a protester. The elderly agent reproaches them for coming to “screw shit”, for calling themselves “anti-fascists” when they don’t “know history”. Between insults of “big shits”, “parasites” or even “anti-France”, he adds: “My motto is “Work, Family, Homeland”. “. Around control, safety RATP forms a cord. Which does not prevent the police officer from threatening young people:
“You're lucky they're here, otherwise you'd be bleeding.” (…) If we didn't have the uniform, you would already be dead. »
Use of the criminal records file
On their tablet, the police officers BAC then all come out TAJ – the file called processing of criminal records – of Léo. They remind him of his harassment at college, for which Léo had filed a complaint several times more than ten years ago. The agents repeatedly insult him as a “big victim”. Another adds:
“Me too, in college, I would have fucked you, you slut.”
They also bring out a complaint for police violence, filed this summer, in which Léo accuses members of the police of having assaulted him during a rally on the Place de la République, in Paris, on the evening of the second round. legislative elections. Here again, the officer in front of him laughs: “You don't like the police, but when you need them there will be trouble at the police station. » “They were all laughing, making fun. It was their little game,” describes Samir. Like Maxime, he reports having seen an agent just behind Léo, hand on the handle of his weapon, miming a brush on the latter. “He was like, 'Do I do it or don't I do it?' It was a game between them,” he repeats.
Leo is “beside himself”. “I didn't let it happen, but I had pain in my stomach, I was trembling, on the verge of tears, I was losing my senses. I was in the same state as when I was hit in middle school, and the teachers did nothing. I told myself that maybe we weren’t going to go back,” he confides, quavering, on the phone. He denounces “a session of psychological torture” which made him feel “helpless and overwhelmed”:
“I had already been mishandled during demonstrations. But there, you are attacked in your deep being. You feel dirty. You feel dirty. »
After the incident, he said he had two sleepless nights.
Their faces taken in photos
Everyone confides that they looked for help from other units stationed nearby. Samir comes across that of a gendarme who checked him a few dozen minutes before. Maxime remains marked by a security agent RATP who “looks him in the eyes, and who turns”. “No one complained,” Léo protests. On the contrary, at the end of the check, when Léo criticizes the police for not having intervened, the latter violently remove him from the station. They are “neighborhood guys” who will take care of him “at the end of his rope”. They would have been the only ones, moreover, to intervene during the check, believing in an attack before recognizing the agents of the BAC.
Two of the young people were also victims of sexual assault during the search. They remember, coldly, the hands of the police officers working for a long time on their crotch until, for one, “grabbing his penis” through the clothes.
Accompanied by a lawyer from the anti-racist Legal Team collective, the demonstrators filed a complaint on Friday, November 22 but fear reprisals. “This summer, it was already against my will. And now, every moment you were naive in your life, the cops use it against you to humiliate you,” says Leo. Above all, claiming a malfunction of their devices dedicated to control, the police allegedly photographed their faces with their personal phones. Maxime and Samir would then have seen photos and their identity information being sent on WhatsApp and SnapChat. Leo is worried:
“Potentially, we have our information and our photos circulating in groups of activists, cops, neofascists. »
Contacted by StreetPress, the Seine-Saint-Denis public prosecutor's office indicated that it was not aware of the facts. The National Police communications department has not responded to date.
(1) The first name has been changed.
