A report was made on Monday to the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) after the broadcast of a video showing a police officer spraying tear gas on the personal effects of homeless migrants in Paris, AFP learned from concurring sources.
On a video relayed last week on Twitter by the association for the aid of exiles Utopia 56, viewed more than a million times, we see a CRS which diffuses several jets of tear gas, in particular on a mattress on the floor. in a makeshift camp under the aerial metro in the north-east of Paris.
“I was able to film practices that exist but which always take place when your back is turned,” an independent activist and observer who wants to be called Ema and who made the report told AFP.
“Three months” of observations
When questioned, the national police told AFP that the Republican Security Companies (CRS) have opened an administrative investigation into these facts, without specifying the date of the opening of the investigation.
On March 9, when she saw a CRS spray “several jets of mattresses and personal belongings hung on a fence”, it had been “three months” that the activist had been carrying out “observations of daily police harassment” on sporadic camps northeast of the capital. “I am waiting for these facts to be sanctioned and for this to serve as an example,” she insisted.
The camp has not been dismantled since
“Street harassment is finally demonstrated,” added Nikolai Posner, a manager of Utopia 56 who accompanied the activist’s approach. The association, on Friday, made a report to the Defender of Rights Claire Hédon.
Since the broadcast of the video, the camp located at the foot of the Stalingrad metro “is no longer dismantled”, observed Utopia 56, while for several weeks the homeless “have been evacuated every morning”.
Two days before the broadcast of the video, “we had distributed blankets and mattresses” to some “50 to 100 Afghan, Sudanese and Chadian asylum seekers who sleep there every night”, added Nikolai Posner.