Under a thick cloud of tear gas, demonstrators get up and leave a stretch of street. The sequence quickly became viral this Friday, May 17, shared more than 2,700 times. During the blocking action of the AG of TotalEnergies, led by environmental activists, “a tear gas canister was dropped in the middle of seated, handcuffed and non-violent demonstrators”, explains on Twitter the freelance journalist Clément Lanot, present on place and who is used to following demonstrations.
The footage he captured sparked outrage and questions about the proportionality of law enforcement’s response. In a statement, Friends of the Earth denounced a “massive” police force, “particularly strong violence from the first minutes”, with point-blank gassing, tear gas canisters thrown into the seated crowd, clothes burned with grenades, arbitrary beatings, arrests, brutalization of activists and journalists.
For the Paris police headquarters, there was no disproportionate use of force in the sequence filmed by Clément Lanot. She explains that several people tried to enter a construction site in a business, that summonses were made, but that they remained “unsuccessful”. “Tear gas was used to disperse the individuals and prevent offenses of degradation or intrusion from being perpetrated”, adds the police headquarters.
“They threw a tear gas canister in the middle of the people”
A process that does not quite correspond to what Clément Lanot saw. “The activists were not in the building site, they were seated and calm, attached to each other,” he says. A person climbed on a construction container, report Clément Lanot and Quentin G., an environmental activist who participated in the blocking action, then joined by another, without intention of degrading. Several members of the police tried to extract him, to handcuff him: “Their superior said no, we left him and he was released”, relates Quentin G.
It was then that the episode of the tear gas grenade took place. After two warnings, “they all put on their masks, they threw a tear gas grenade in the middle of the people who were seated”, continues the activist. Clément Lanot also indicates that the grenade was “put in the crowd” and did not target the person on the container. As we see on the video, the activists get up, are pushed “and bludgeoned”, specifies Quentin G., to be evacuated.
“The prefecture’s argument is nonsense”
“He stayed on the container until the end of the morning, he descended on his own initiative and left the site without ever damaging anything and he was then deprived of his liberty when he descended,” adds Quentin G. For Arié Alimi, lawyer at the Paris bar, “the prefecture’s arguments are nonsense, he protests. Proportionality can only be assessed when the grenade is placed and where it is placed, and because of the objective pursued. There, concretely, they put the grenade in the middle of the group to disperse it, the other reasons put forward have nothing to do with the grenade. »
In the law enforcement scheme, the necessary, graduated and proportionate nature of the use of force must be assessed. And it is on proportionality that Ariel Alimi believes that there is “a real subject”. Taking into account the peaceful nature of the gathering, “it seems to me that there were other ways of doing things, in particular manual extraction”, adding that the police “wanted to save means “. Quentin G. indicates that a few people were manually extracted for “those who had put on coveralls and molasses to symbolize Total’s dirty money, but at no time did they attempt to use the soft way for the rest of the group “.
For Ariel Alimi, this in itself creates violence and a disturbance of public order. He believes that if a complaint were filed, a judge could say that “this is not enough justification since the obligation of proportionality has not been respected”.