A police officer sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence for violence recounted by an undercover journalist

A police officer was sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence on Tuesday, November 3, by the Paris criminal court, for aggravated violence against two minors, more than six years after the story of a journalist who infiltrated the Paris police station where they worked. In his book Flic, published in 2020, Valentin Gendrot describes the “beatings”, the racist and homophobic insults, but also the lack of resources, the suicides and the discomfort of the police officers in a police station in eastern Paris, where he spent six months as a security assistant.

Everything is "embroidered" and "romanticized" in this work, which gives "the impression that we are all racists, misogynists, (...) violent, which is not the case", defended in the preamble the police officer Marc F., who describes a "colorful" brigade and simply recognizes "jargon" and "jokes". The 38-year-old peacekeeper was on trial for violence committed against two brothers in April 2019. The "humiliating little slaps" given to the younger brother during a check had triggered the anger of the older brother, who was arrested for intervening, reports the president. According to the prosecutor, he then received, “locked between four walls” in the car, “punches after punches”, then a new blow when he arrived at the police station.

Now a drone pilot at the Paris police headquarters, the official refused to question himself: “It was action-reaction, it was proportionate,” he said in particular. The violence was not reported in the intervention report, described as "false" by journalist Valentin Gendrot, who was present at its writing. Several episodes of violence recounted throughout the pages of the book Flic could not be corroborated by the "failure of identification" investigation of the people concerned, most often migrants, but nevertheless interest the three judges.