As police tried to disperse students amid riots outside a suburban Paris school last month, they approached a 14-year-old boy who was lingering near the school entrance.
Their initial interaction is unclear, but the teen soon got into a heated argument with police. As the situation intensified, a police officer poked him with a tear gas cannon, according to video footage verified by The New York Times. Then a female police officer hit him with her baton, according to prosecutors, footage and a teacher who witnessed the altercation.
The boy kicked the policewoman, according to the footage, prosecutors and teacher Mathieu Moreau.
The police officer, who was standing about two meters from the boy, fired a tear gas canister into his face, breaking his jaw and destroying many of his teeth.
The boy, whose family identified only as Eden, was not available for an interview because he has not been able to speak since his surgery the day after the incident, according to his lawyer, Elsa Marcel. The officer, who was not named, said he fired a tear gas canister because he thought the officer was at risk, according to prosecutors who questioned him. He was suspended and indicted. The Interior Ministry declined to comment on the incident.
The police officers’ actions sparked a national outcry. They were seen and cited by some protesters and others as an incident that helped explain the anger and intensity of the student demonstrations that began in late September and then morphed into a national protest movement that led on Saturday to some of the worst riots France has seen in years.
Student protests initially aimed to improve conditions at high schools, including improving crumbling facilities and hiring more teachers. These protests often turned violent when participants burned or ransacked at least 24 schools, according to the government, leading police to respond forcefully. Police officers arrested about 8,000 people during the high school protests and often used controversial crowd control methods, such as stun grenades, which have led to accusations of police brutality.
Instead of easing the unrest, police actions against teenagers like Eden helped galvanize students and adult citizens across the country, giving them more reason to protest.
It culminated on Saturday with huge demonstrations across France, with people of all ages protesting against a range of social demands, including police violence against students.
These protests were accompanied by other unrest in the streets, with rioters taking the opportunity to loot stores and burn government buildings.
Now the police are accused of being too weak in preventing Saturday’s violence – and of being too heavy-handed in their handling of the protests that led to the riots.
Faced with this contradiction, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu declared Monday: “For three weeks, we have heard that the police are killing or injuring people. And then, for two days, we have been asked: ‘What are the police doing?’ A very French schizophrenia.
“Walking a fine line”
The government has defended the way police handled student protests in the run-up to the weekend’s chaos, pointing out that officers were often forced to deal with violent unrest.
“We are walking a fine line here because it is a difficult situation to manage,” said Laurent Nuñez, the interior minister, during a recent hearing in Parliament. “When protests are peaceful, there are no arrests by the police.”
Critics of the police counter that, even in this context, the police have been extremely harsh in their approach to a movement led by teenagers. Prosecutors and France’s police watchdog are investigating at least 34 accusations of police misconduct during weeks of protests.
These cases include that of a 15-year-old boy whose left hand was blown off, the Interior Ministry said, probably due to the explosion of a police stun grenade; a 16-year-old boy was hospitalized, prosecutors said, after an eye injury “comparable to being hit” by some type of rubber bullet; and a 17-year-old boy whose hand was destroyed by a grenade, according to prosecutors.
Concerns about police behavior during protests have surfaced several times in recent years, including between 2018 and 2020 during the “yellow vest” movement, when several demonstrators, protesting against rising gas prices and other issues, lost their sight after being shot by police with rubber projectiles.
Experts believe the number of incidents is due to police increasingly using heavy weapons, inappropriate for crowd control.
“We are talking about figures that should encourage the government to reevaluate the use of these weapons,” said Sébastien Roché, a professor at the National Center for Scientific Research who studies the police and has documented injuries caused by police weapons since the 2000s. “What is happening is the transposition to an adolescent population of a repressive approach that has evolved over the last ten years.”
Mr. Nuñez told the parliamentary hearing that it was “excessive” to characterize the police response as “repression,” but he suspended police use of a certain type of stun grenade during student protests.
“Completely unable to speak”
Eden’s face was mutilated just weeks after she enrolled at Lycée Château d’Épluches, a vocational high school in Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, just north of Paris. The school trains students – almost all boys from disadvantaged backgrounds – to become auto mechanics and truck drivers.
Less than a month after Eden began studying there, unrest broke out in schools across the country as students protested dilapidated buildings, overcrowded schedules and absent teachers. The protests quickly reached Château d’Épluches, where the number of students increased to 630 from 480 in 2014, without a comparable increase in resources to cope with the increase in enrollment, according to teachers, including Mr. Moreau.
As in many schools affected by the protests, students gathered outside the school entrance, lit fires in the street and refused to attend classes.
Police often responded with tear gas, according to residents, teachers and students.
One resident, Massira Tazi, said: “They are protesting for what they need, but they should not break things or start fires. »
Another, Nisrine Bensmaine, said the police had again been too harsh. “After all, they are minors,” she said.
Prosecutors investigating the officers said Eden was among the protesters. According to Mr. Moreau, Ms. Marcel and the texts seen by the Times that Eden sent to his mother, the boy was not involved in the protests.
“There are roadblocks, I’m going home,” he wrote to his mother after arriving at school on September 25.
“OK but please take care of yourself,” she replied.
“Yes mom,” he wrote.
On the day of his injury, September 28, clashes between police and students began after boys set off fireworks in a nearby park, according to Mr. Moreau. This prompted police to use tear gas, he said.
Mr. Moreau was trying to get the students into the school, he said, when a bottle was thrown in the direction of the police. The teacher went to police and begged them not to fight back, he said. The police sprayed more tear gas, he said, dispersing most of the students.
While prosecutors said Eden was “one” of the protesters, without giving further details, a video Eden sent to his mother during the clashes shows the teen watching from near a parking lot, about 50 yards from the unrest. Prosecutors and police have not accused him of lighting fireworks or throwing the bottle.
Eden did not immediately leave the scene when the police fired the gas, according to Mr. Moreau, who spotted Eden from a distance.
Mr. Moreau said police then approached Eden and forced him to stand up, leading to a fight that was filmed by several bystanders and also later described by prosecutors.
Prosecutors did not say how the fight started, but described a standoff in which officers repeatedly tried to push Eden away as he continued to move toward them.
After the policewoman hit him with her baton, Eden kicked him in the thigh. At that point, the police officer, “carrying a tear gas launcher known as a ‘Cougar,’ fired horizontally at the young man, who was standing in front of him,” prosecutors wrote in a statement.
The officer believed he had “only a fraction of a second to protect her and her team,” the statement added.
Eden will take at least six weeks to recover, according to medical records reviewed by The Times that show the boy is at risk of long-term chronic pain and movement restrictions in his jaw.
Eden’s mother, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said Eden often wrote her messages asking if he would ever get his old face back.
His lawyer, Ms. Marcel, asked prosecutors to consider charging the officer with attempted murder.
“He will have to undergo extremely invasive surgeries. He is completely unable to speak or eat normally. His jaw will be completely immobilized for several weeks,” Ms. Marcel said in an interview. “Obviously, there was intense psychological trauma on top of that – he could have died. »
The Interior Ministry said it could not comment on the matter while the police investigation was ongoing.
Mr. Moreau, the teacher who witnessed the scene, said he and his colleagues wondered what could have justified the police response to Eden.
“Why? I mean, why?” » said Mr. Moreau. “What danger did he pose at that time?
The report was provided by John Ismay from Washington, Monika Cvorák from London, and Jonathan Baran from New York.
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