“The images of my attack still haunt me today and I can no longer erase them from my mind. But I owe them a lot. Without them, I would be in prison, or worse. » Beaten in the hall of his recording studio by three police officers one evening in November 2020, music producer Michel Zecler will never thank enough this small video surveillance camera that he had installed a few years earlier. It is she who will undermine the version of the police officers from the 17th arrondissement police station, who filed a complaint against him for “rebellion” and “violence against people holding public authority”.
The procedure opened against Michel Zecler will ultimately be dismissed by the prosecution after viewing the video surveillance images. The photo of Michel Zecler, with a swollen face, on the front page of Libération the next day, shocked public opinion, including the President of the Republic himself. As the trial of the three accused police officers opens this Monday before the Paris criminal court, the role of the videos and the alleged lies of sworn officials will be at the heart of the debates, almost six years after the events.
A beating for a forgotten mask
This evening of November 21, 2020, while France is plunged into the middle of the Covid crisis and wearing a mask is compulsory in the street, Michel Zecler does not wear one when he walks to his studio, where around ten young people, rappers, sound engineers or friends are waiting for him. Patrolling the neighborhood by car, the police decide to carry out a check. Michel Zecler hurries on to reach his lair. In a few seconds, his life and that of the police officers are turned upside down. In his book Staying Standing, published by Plon in 2021, he tells the story.
“A first punch hits me. I don't understand anything. A Rangers kick to the shins, knee strikes, punches. “What are you doing?” I ask them. They hit. It's not possible, it can't be true, must I be dreaming? But the violence of the punches in the face makes me realize that what is happening is very real. »
Filmed without sound, the scene is incredibly violent. Michel Zecler never responds to blows. As the indictment order specifies, “Michel Zecler only showed passive resistance, which cannot justify the avalanche of blows he suffered.” “I spread my arms, I don't want anyone to believe that I'm aggressive, I'm aware that I shouldn't hit the slightest blow, I don't do anything, I'm afraid,” he says.
The prosecution evokes a desire to “distort reality”
A version that is the opposite of that delivered by the police in the report written after the intervention. They claim that Michel Zecler forced them to enter the hall to beat them, going so far as to try to seize the service weapon of one of the agents. The IGPN investigators will have to confront them with the images so that they recognize having provided a truncated vision of the facts. If they refuse to admit to having knowingly distorted reality, the prosecution concludes that “the existence of falsehoods in the report which clearly go beyond the problem of the subjectivity of human testimony and testify to a desire to distort reality”.
Although it is difficult today to measure the extent of false reports in cases of police violence, for some observers, the Zecler affair is far from being an isolated case. Author of an investigation on the subject in 2022 for Politis, Nadia Sweeny, journalist specializing in police and judicial issues and currently at the Media, is categorical: “Forgery in public writing is systematic in cases of police violence, it is even its corollary. The police systematically put two elements in place to defend themselves when they slip up: forgery and a complaint against the victim for contempt and rebellion, or even intentional violence, as is the case in the Zecler case. »
“There will always be false reports”
A month after infiltrating a police station in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, independent journalist Valentin Gendrot is also confronted with this mechanism. During an intervention at the foot of a building where young people are listening to music on a portable speaker, the tone rises after a police officer slaps one of them. The teenager reacted, he was beaten and, later, a report was drawn up at the police station. “They said that the teenager had provoked us, hit us and that the police officer had never dealt the slightest blow, which is completely false,” relates our colleague present on site that day. All this so that the kid appears as the aggressor and not the victim. We were in 2019 and, unlike what happened with Michel Zecler, there was no video of the intervention. »
“In cases of police violence, as long as there are no videos, there will always be false reports. We only realize the forgery in writing when images come out and show the opposite of what the police officers said,” assures police captain Agnès Naudin, today on sick leave after being sanctioned by the judicial institution following the release of her book The Law of Omerta, co-written with former PJ officer Fabien Bilheran.
A “particularly important” means
For lawyer Vincent Brengarth, “videos today constitute a particularly important means of proof”. Without them, “the victim is confronted with the words of the officials involved who have the material possibility of consulting each other. It is therefore not uncommon that, in a desire to remove responsibility, some people very quickly seek to bring out a particular representation of reality, even if it means having to modify it when videos are subsequently revealed.”
Contacted by 20 Minutes, the Ministry of the Interior had not responded to our questions at the time we published these lines. In addition to forgery in public documents, the three police officers will be judged for “intentional violence by a person holding public authority, in a meeting and with a weapon, resulting in total incapacity for work for more than eight days”. Michel Zecler was given 45 days of ITT. The debates must last six days and the police officers face up to fifteen years of criminal imprisonment and a fine of 250,000 euros.
