His analysis is only advisory but his words weigh heavily. In observations submitted to the Paris court on May 12 and revealed by Mediapart, the rights defender, Jacques Toubon, denounces the existence of "systemic discrimination" in a police station in the 12th arrondissement of the capital. "The succession of checks, identity checks, palpations, searches and conduct at the police station" which were victims, between July 2013 and July 2015, a group of adolescents and young adults of North African and African origin According to the independent authority, the Erard-Rozanoff neighborhood is not the sole responsibility of the individual initiatives of the accused police, but of a discriminatory system which creates for victims "an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment".
Engage State responsibility
These observations, which 20 Minutes was able to consult, are part of a civil procedure launched against the State in July 2019 by 18 minors and young adults. In their complaint, filed in 2015, they denounced the practices of a dozen police officers from the neighborhood support group against them. Verbal, physical and sexual assaults during identity checks, arbitrary arrests, kidnappings ... In April 2018, three of these police officers were suspended, five months in prison, all appealed against this judgment.
"The criminal proceedings allowed us to attack the individual responsibility of the police, which allows us to engage the responsibility of the state," said the plaintiffs' lawyer, Me Slim Ben Achour. And the council specifies: "Each time that the police officers are condemned for police violence, their hierarchy presents them as" bad apples ". However, here, the Defender of Rights shows that this discrimination is systemic, that it is part of a set of prejudices that crosses society ”.
Young people described as “undesirable”
The Defender of Rights notes that the police officers accused acted on "instructions from the hierarchy". Originally, they were responsible for multiplying patrols in order to identify groups of young people in order to "oust them", "that is to say, to ask them to leave the area when disturbances such as noise, dirt, consumption of narcotic drugs was noted. In fact, says the senior official, they were targeting "always the same young people, who were qualified in the handrail registers as 'undesirable', a particularly stigmatizing term". Controls which intervened even when no nuisance was noted, as a "preventive" or for reasons outside the legal framework. And Jacques Toubon to cite the example of this teenager whose cell phone was checked on the pretext that he had uttered an insult to their passage. “The cumulative effect of these behaviors creates a climate of exclusion and discrimination. "
If the State was already condemned in 2016 for identity checks "facies" - the Court of Cassation had considered that a discriminatory identity check constituted a "gross negligence" - the subject remains more than ever in the news. Tuesday, nearly 20,000 people gathered in front of the courthouse in Paris at the call of relatives of Adama Traore to denounce police violence and discriminatory abuses within the police. Charges which had been challenged, a few hours earlier, by the Paris police prefect. "The police of the Parisian agglomeration is neither violent, nor racist: they act within the framework of the right for the freedom of all", wrote Didier Lallement in an email to his 27,500 agents. And to add: “if some of us fail in the requirement of impartiality and excellence which is ours, they will be sanctioned as they have been to date. "
Society
Facial controls: Young men perceived as black or North African are 20 times more likely to be controlled
Paris
Facial control: "You can't control me just because my name is Mamadou and I'm black"
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