A video then two versions, that of Internet users and that of the police. Filmed in Toulouse and relayed on social networks [in particular by groups on the far left], images showing a policeman hitting a man with a muzzle have shocked internet users since Saturday. The police, on the other hand, refute any violence and claim to have had to master a dangerous man who has escaped from the psychiatric department of the hospital.
On these images shot at around 2:30 am this Saturday morning by a resident of the Cartoucherie district, we can clearly see police officers accompanied by two dogs actually trying to subdue a man, with their muzzle. The man is pressed to the ground by a police officer, held by another while a third strikes him with muzzle blows asking him to put his hands behind his back. Reinforcements arrive quickly.
Man reported as "carrying grenade and handgun"
According to the union SGP Police union, the police were called that morning after a man, reported as "violent and dangerous and potentially carrying a grenade and a handgun", is escaped from the psychiatric department of Purpan hospital. When the police find him, "the man who measures 1.90 and weighs 120 kilos is difficult to control. He strikes and punches, ”details the union in a press release.
"He was attacking the police who were trying to control him," continues the SGP Police Unit through the voice of his regional secretary in Occitania, Didier Martinez. It had become necessary to handcuff him in order to try to reason with him that the police managed to control him. "The operation was delicate and the police had to use force to put the very corpulent individual out of harm's way," explains Didier Martinez at 20 Minutes, who ensures that the sequence broadcast on Facebook or Twitter was "truncated of much of its substance".
"We believe in a violent scene, but there are causal links"
The almost two-minute video begins when the individual is already on the ground and struck on the neck with the muzzle. “These only images were looped on a single action that is believed to last forever and that the actions of the response team are illegitimate. My colleagues know that they are constantly filmed, that they are called to account all the time. They're not going to expose themselves like that unnecessarily. We believe in a violent scene, but there are cause and effect links. We must try to understand, ”insists Didier Martinez. The secretary general regrets, moreover, that his colleagues who are "every night the targets of violence" are "once again the subject of stigma and accusations".
The file on police violence
On Twitter, in comments on the video, Internet users, they denounce "shocking images", "police violence", "free relentlessness" and "cops who taste like blood"
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