French police are threatening to abandon their key role enforcing their country’s Coronavirus lockdown – as complaints against their increasingly aggressive behaviour mount.
They are currently in the frontline of the ‘War’ against Covid-19, handing out £128 fines to anyone caught on the street without official documentation.
But a series of shocking videos posted online show officers breaking all basic health guidelines by grouping together and manhandling potential disease carriers as they issued half-a-million pounds worth of fines on Wednesday.
French police are being accused of using excessive force in their new role, handing out £128 fines to anyone caught on the street without official documentation amid the coronavirus pandemic. Pictured: French police taking down a woman without proper documentation in France
Pictured: French police taking down a woman without proper documentation in France
There was no social distancing among officers, very few wore masks, and all mixed freely as some used physical violence against members of the public.
Benoît Barret, national secretary of the Alliance police union, on Thursday said: ‘Alliance’s position is clear – if colleagues are not safe, they will exercise their right of withdrawal.
‘Behind each policeman, there is a father, a mother, a brother – you have the right to be a policeman and not become a spreader.
Pictured: French police taking down a woman without proper documentation in France
‘If tomorrow the police are sick, there will be no more people of the streets, and in this case, who can maintain peace in this democracy?’
There are currently some 100,000 police and gendarmes enforcing a lockdown that came into force at midday on Tuesday.
The prospect of a mass police walk-out will be a disaster for a country already facing economic and social chaos.
Police officers, as public service workers, retain the right to withdraw their labour under French law. They do not often go on strike, but they are entitled to.
Pictured: French police taking down a woman without proper documentation in France
If a significant number of French cops withdrew their service, a bigger burden would be placed on the military to maintain law and order.
The Gendarmes, howeber, are a military unit and are unable to go on strike.
Some police officers have been accused of showing discrimination towards ethnic minority communities who do not have the right paperwork in major cities such as Paris.
Around a dozen officers from the CRS (Republican Security Companies) were severely criticised on Wednesday for knocking a 17-year-old girl to the ground in front of her mother.
Pictured: French police taking down a woman without proper documentation in France
‘No break from racism, even during the Coronavirus crisis,’ said civil liberties and human rights campaigner Yasser Louati.
‘Watch in disgust a black woman being thrown to the ground, handcuffed by French police for not having her document to leave her house,’ said Mr Louati, adding: ‘Meanwhile white Parisians can run around the city, unchecked by this same police.’
Amar Taoualit, the video journalist who filmed the scene in a north Paris market, said: ‘Arrest of a woman by the police because she had no certificate and she refuses the fine !!’
French police can be seen squaring up to a man before actions which have been condemned as having used excessive force
A French police officer can be seen booting a member of the public during coronavirus lockdown in the country
Taha Bouhafs, another French reporter, wrote ‘National unity is doing well’ as he posted a video of a police officer kicking a man who was showing them his Coronavirus document.
Britons leaving Paris are among those who have found themselves surrounded by police threatening to fine them for venturing out.
British commuter Toby Rose, the director of the Palm Dog Awards linked to Cannes Film Festival – said he would now stop his regular London and Paris trips.
‘There are police all over Paris enforcing these fines,’ said Mr Rose, as he waited for his train at the Paris station.
‘The new measures are becoming tougher all the time, and information is not clear at all. Travel between the two countries is rapidly becoming impossible.’
As Mr Rose spoke, large patrols of police surrounded him, including armed officers from the CRS.
A French Interior Ministry spokesman confirmed that police have the right to strike, and that individual officers could sign off duty for personal reasons including ill health.
Hospitals in France are struggling to cope after admitting 3626 Coronavirus sufferers – including 931 who are in intensive care.
Among the most serious cases, half are aged ‘less than 60 years’, said Jérôme Salomon, France’s Director General of Health, who also announced a total of 264 deaths from the disease.
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Coronavirus panic sparks violence in France as shoppers brawl because they were not keeping a safe distance in supermarket queue
This is the moment two shoppers brawl in a large queue outside a supermarket in France over keeping a safe distance during the COVID-19 lockdown.
The incident was filmed outside a supermarket in the commune of Viry-Chatillon in the southern suburbs of the French capital Paris on 17 March and the footage has been viewed over 660,000 times on Twitter.
In the video, two men are seen brawling in the queue before others jump in and separate the pair.
One man can be seen charging into the other after a row broke out over maintaining safe distance amid the coronavirus pandemic in Paris yesterday
One of the fighters, in the blue hat, can be seen in the middle of the scrap at a Paris supermarket yesterday
To the right, the two men can be seen brawling at the supermarket in Paris’ southern suburbs yesterday
Other shoppers can be seen huddled around the brawling men at the supermarket in Paris yesterday
The cameraperson says: ‘Seriously man, that’s just crazy.’
According to local media, the fight started during a row about keeping a safe distance in public places during the COVID-19 lockdown in France.
An eyewitness said that the men had been in the queue for ‘probably an hour’ as it was moving very slowly.
The witness explained: ‘Around the queue, people kept saying that distances had to be kept.’
According to local media, one of the brawlers had to be pushed away by two security guards employed by the supermarket to cope with the large queues.
Meanwhile, the Evry public prosecutor’s office has confirmed that police attended the scene and that no one filed a complaint.
A spokesperson for the office said: ‘No victims came forward, there were no apparent injuries and there was no complaint.’
Reports said that there have been long queues at supermarkets since French president Emmanuel Macron announced a lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19 which began on 17th March.
As anxious consumers around the world stockpile toilet paper and pasta, the French are thronging bakeries for baguettes, fearing a shortage of their daily bread as they wait out the coronavirus epidemic in confinement.
The country of 67 million people consumes nine billion of the long loaves every year, has an annual competition for the best baguette in Paris, and a special word for the pointy end they chew off on their way home from the baker after work: the crouton.
Bakers are among the few essential-service businesses allowed to stay open in France under strict anti-virus confinement measures that took effect on Tuesday.
A baker wearing a mask and protective gloves scans the temperature of a customer wearing a protective mask using a digital front thermometer at the entrance to his bakery the day after the announcement by French President Emmanuel Macron of the confinement of the French from Wednesday at noon to stem the spread of the coronavirus
An employee, wearing a protective face mask, displays some baguettes at the bakery ‘Ma Boulangerie’ in Vertou near Nantes as France faces an aggressive progression of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), yesterday
And they are thriving, with long lines in the cities and countryside alike.
‘Our numbers have doubled since Monday,’ Addenour Koriche, sales manager of a bakery attached to a large supermarket north of Paris, told AFP on Wednesday.
‘We are now on 800 baguettes per day. Yesterday, for example, we had no baguettes left to sell by 3:00 pm.’ The store closes five hours later.
The bakery sported newly-applied black lines on the floor, improvised with lengths of tape, to help customers respect the suggested one-metre (3.3-foot) safety distance to limit spreading the virus that has sickened more than 7,700 people and killed 175 in France.
A brand-new perspex screen shielded the vendor – wearing latex gloves but no face mask, and atypically using tongs to handle the bread – from a steady stream of customers.
French baker Sylvain Cabane, wearing a protective face mask, takes out of the oven a tray of baguettes at the bakery ‘Ma Boulangerie’ in Vertou, near Nantes, as France faces an aggressive progression of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), yesterday
‘We have people who normally take a half a baguette or one baguette per day, who are now taking four or five to freeze them in case even stricter confinement measures are announced,’ said Koriche.
On Tuesday, France’s labour ministry approved a special waiver allowing bakeries to be open seven days a week instead of the legal limit of six days.
‘The waiver will allow the French to buy bread without stress every day,’ noted Matthieu Labbe of the Federation of Bakeries.
‘We’ve seen people come in who want to buy 50 baguettes at a time. There’s something like a psychosis in some people.’
Labbe said there need be no concern over supply, even as some bakers have taken to placing a limit on sales per client.
‘We have flour, yeast and salt. There is no problem to produce bread.’
There are 33,000 bakeries in France, one to about 2,000 people on average, but most neighbourhoods boast several – sometimes even in the same street.
US-born historian Steven Kaplan, himself a trained baker, said French bread consumption has decreased dramatically – from about 600 grammes per person per day in 1900 to about 80 grammes today.
But despite bread no longer being viewed as a bare essential, it is engrained in French culture, even its politics – a source of pride and cultural exceptionalism.
‘The welfare state is first sketched out in France as a state that assures people its bread,’ said Kaplan, who lives in Paris.
‘Bakeries have always been a quasi public service,’ he added, noting that during the privations of World War One and Two, bread once again took its place as the main source of nutrition.
‘Even in the worst kind of crisis the baker has to be open, like the fire station, like the pharmacy, like the hospital,’ said Kaplan.
On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron sought to impress upon the French that they were engaged in a ‘war’ against the coronavirus, using the word several times in a televised address to the nation.
‘In a war context we are confined, we have an enemy – the enemy is invisible but its still the enemy – we have to fight it and in this context when people are worried about obtaining food… the return to bread is in some sense a quasi-instinctive or almost atavistic return to something familiar,’ said Kaplan.
Dominique Anract, president of the national confederation of bakeries and pastry shops, said the industry employed 180,000 people in France.
‘Bread is food, but it is also a social link between people. Some people have the habit of coming to the bakery every day for a chat.’
For the French, ‘bread is a reassuring staple food even though with globalisation habits have changed,’ he said.