- Friday, June 12, several police demonstrated in Paris in reaction to Christophe Castaner's announcements on police violence and the fight against racism within the police.
- A tweet comparing an extract from the media coverage of the demonstration on BFMTV and an aerial photo claims to prove that the news channel continuously swelled the ranks of the procession thanks to its way of framing it.
- But the two extracts were taken at a different time, the ranks of the procession being more or more full, and a re-viewing of the live BFMTV shows that we could see a very small number of police there.
On the one hand, a compact crowd which seems to hide, behind its banners, an even larger number of demonstrators. On the other, a photo taken from above showing a group of ten people with more than sparse ranks.
"" The massive police demonstration "described in the media VS the reality, #findelablague", says the tweet to more than 5,000 retweets and 8,000 "likes" comparing the first image, taken from a BFMTV live entitled "Police : unions in front of the ministry "in the photo supposed to show behind the scenes of this scene, which took place Friday June 12 in Paris.
"The massive demonstration of #policiers" described in the media VS reality. #FinDeLaBlague pic.twitter.com/r3b2X0Tehq
- Raphaël✊🏾🌎 (@raph_mls) June 12, 2020However, if this tweet shows the same event, it compares two different moments of the demonstration - and suggests, wrongly, that its media coverage would have led to believe a large crowd when few police were mobilized.
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Friday morning, several police unions - Alliance, UNSA-Police, Synergie and the Independent Union of Police Commissioners (SICP) - met at Place de l'Etoile to take Avenue des Champs-Elysées and complete their route in front of the Ministry of the Interior, place Beauvau. A means of directly demonstrating to Christophe Castaner their dissatisfaction in the wake of his announcements on "zero tolerance" against racism within the police.
The aerial photo was taken shortly after the procession began to descend the avenue des Champs-Elysées, more precisely at number 114 of the avenue, a stone's throw from the Louis Vuitton store, as can be seen on Google Street View . At that time, the BFMTV teams had already started their coverage of the demonstration for several minutes. And the images of the channel clearly showed the very small number of police officers present, as evidenced by this capture taken at 10:21 a.m.
A plan filmed behind the demonstrators when they arrived in front of the Louis Vuitton store - and near the blue and green van that can be found in the aerial photo that has become viral - also makes it possible to observe, from another angle, that there are only ten of them. It is then 10:26.
The allegedly "misleading" screenshot of BFMTV relayed in the tweet, it was taken at 10.58 am, in front of the Minister of the Interior, at the moment when the procession sang the Marseillaise. During this thirty-minute interval, the ranks of the police increased slightly, as we can see at 10.59 am, when the procession, being dispersed, is filmed over its entire width by BFMTV. The demonstrators are clearly more numerous than on the Champs-Elysées, even if the difference is counted in tens.
Finally, neither the 24-hour news channel nor the various press titles which mentioned this mobilization mentioned a “massive demonstration”. The AFP dispatch taken up by Ouest-France simply spoke of the mobilization of "several unions" while Le Parisien more specifically evoked a demonstration gathering "a dozen police officers".
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