On Tuesday morning French police stopped a young delivery driver without probable cause, suspicion or any reason at all. Two police officers surrounded his car. The young delivery driver, who could not but be aware of the increasingly murderous police state brutality of French police, sought to escape. After refusing to produce a driver’s license, one of the two French police officers shot the the young delivery driver in the chest, ending his life.
The French police officers, fearing arrest for murder, sought to cover up their brutal, inhumane, sadistic murder, falsified their report on the incident, claiming that the young delivery driver, who was at the wheel of a yellow Mercedes AMG in Nanterre, France, sought to run the police officers over. Fearing for their lives, the liars stated, the police officers opened firing, ending the young delivery driver’s life on the stop.
Had it not been for eyewitnesses who were filming the incident from afar, the police might have been to escape a murder charge with impunity. Later in the day, however, a video of the police officer shooting the young delivery drive began to surface on social media. The video has since become viral.
Contrary to the police officers’ false report, the video shows two officers standing next to a stopped car. One of the officers is seen pointing his gun at the young delivery driver through his driver side window. The car is seen starting to pull away, as the officer fires the deadly shot that kills the driver. The audio of the video, which many of the major Western print media refused to report, captures the officers words before the deadly shot that kills the driver. The officer says, “You will receive a bullet in the head!” In another report, the audio is reported as saying, “I’m planning on lodging a bullet in your head.” The audio occurs before the vehicle is seen starting to pull away.
The delivery driver hailed form one of the poorest neighborhoods in Nanterre, France. Named Nahel, the delivery driver came from a working class suburb 15 minutes by commuter train from central Paris. The area where police killed the delivery driver is in the suburbs of Paris, a place called “la banlieu”. The suburb “la banlieu”. is the product of class segregation. Plagued by poverty, many of its residents are of Arab or African descent, particularly from countries that France colonized.
The officer who executed the delivery driver is in custody with a charge for involuntary manslaughter. In a video posted online, the delivery driver’s mother said: “I lost a 17-year-old… They took my baby away from me. He was still a child. He needed his mother.” The delivery driver’s mother is quoted as saying that he dreamed of being a mechanic.
Described as an ‘execution’ by the family’s lawyers, the delivery driver’s death has caused increasingly widespread outrage throughout Nantes, Île-de-France Clamart, Nanterre, Nice, Lille, Mersailles before reaching into Paris on Thursday night.
Pictures of the city of Nantes displayed much of the city as ablaze. In one quote from Twitter a user states: “The City of Nantes near the Northwestern Coast of France is Burning.”
In a tweet posted by the news agency BFMTV reads as “La circulation des bus et des tramways stoppée apres 21h dans les quarter touchés par les violences urbanites en Île-de-France,” where a large march called “la Marche blanche pour Nahel” is seen.
A tramway in Clamart, which is in the Hauts-de-Seine, is seen as having been burnt by protesters. In Marseille, la plus grand bibliotheque, is photographed ablaze, demonstrating the degree to which anarchy rather than organized critical mass of working class opposition has captured the hearts of the protesters.
In Marsaille ever widening acts of anarchy include robbery, looting, or arson, are leading many to conclude that authorities are on the verge of losing control over the city.
On Thursday night, the French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said that 180 officers were injured in Wednesday night’s clashes. In response to the injuries, Darmanin ordered that his initial response by multiple many times over. In his initial response to protests, Darmanin dispatched more than 2,000 police officers, thinking that the death of a working class youth could hardly cause anyone any harm.
Darmanin ordered that these numbers of police be multiplied by more than 20 times, ordering no less than 40,000 French riot police to spread out across France in an effort to subdue the protesters, a massive increase.
It is clear that the massive increase in the number of French riot police Darmanin is the result of his failure to appraise the outrage the murder his police officers caused. “This wasn’t about small protest,” Darmanin is quoted as saying before he ordered the augmentation of his forces.
Seeking justice for the non major, non-critical, or non-life-threatening injuries his 180 officers suffered in attempting to suppress the protests he initially appraised as small, Darnanin also demanded “justice, calm, and freedom,” for no one but the French riot police.
Darmanin, who refused to express condolence for the execution, described Wednesday’s expression of legitimate dissatisfaction with the government as “a night of unbearable violence against the symbols of the Republic.” In the eyes of Darmanin, who sees the ‘people’ as opposed to the Republic, the ‘armed bodies of the state’ are Republic’s symbols. Darmanin’s inverted point of view, which views the population in opposition to the Republic, is thoroughly anti-democratic. The
people are the symbols of the Republic, lest there be no Republic at all.
Emmanuel Macron, whose regime stands on the precipice of collapse, issued a statement of support for the police state crackdown, requesting the French protesters to let “justice run its course,” by which phrase Macron intended to mean the brutal suppression of any or all dissent to his regime’s protection for executioners.
The French riot police, who are well known throughout Europe, have one of the most venerated reputations throughout the continent, especially within the “la banlieu”. In accordance with their reputation for the disproportionate use of force, the CRS more than doubled the number of its wounded with arrests, arresting more than 255 people anywhere or everywhere. This heavily deflated figure, which is suspect, is likely many times larger, as police are well known for their exploitation of ‘probable cause’ for the sake of falsifying reports in support of bogus charges. It is likely that more than a thousand protesters have been arrested on charges unrelated to their activism.
On Thursday The Wall Street Journal sought to downplay the significance of the police state execution of the delivery driver by claiming that France has no reason to complain about the low number of officer involved shootings in comparison to the United States. “Despite the criticism, French police kill far fewer people than their counterparts in the U.S.,” the newspaper reported in an article entitled, “Riots Break Out Near Paris After Police Kill Teenager.”
“The French national police and the gendarmes, which police rural areas, killed 26 people in 2019, according to BastaMag, a French media organization. U.S. police forces killed 1, 098 people that year, according to Mapping Police Violence, a group that tracks police killings.”
The decision to select the year 2019 as opposed to 2022 is likely driven by a desire to conceal the fact that during the course of the three intervening years the number of police murders police committed in the United States has risen sharply. In 2022, for instance, the number of people, the vast majority of whom are working class, poor, or underprivileged, rose to more than 1,176 people for an average of 3.2 deaths a day.
Described as a reign of terror in the United States, the culmination of these anti-Constitutional, extrajudicial, inhumane police state murders reached a high point in the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which not only cost the United States a significant sum of money but erupted in the largest expression of popular outrage in the country’s history of popular outrage against police brutality.
The eruption of outrage against the death of the delivery driver in France occurs against the backdrop of a significant rise in the number of strikes occurring throughout France, stemming originally from the protests Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular decision to raise the age of retirement by two years caused months ago. French newspaper staffs are starting to strike at Le Journal du Dimanche. As reported by Le Monde, one of the most popular French dailies with a wide circulation, “[three] French airports [canceled] flights due to air traffic control strikes,” indicating that along the country’s lines of communication strikes are beginning to paralyze movement, one of the most significant signs of organized resistance by labor. These strikes come on the backs of many strikes trade union bureaucracies have sabotaged time and time again over the past few months. The months long protests are beginning to coalescence in consolidated working class resistance.
In that regard, the struggle against police state brutality is inseparable from a struggle against capitalism. Workers in Paris must seek to unify their opposition to Emmanuel Macron’s imposition of an increase in the age of retirement, which no constituency within the population supports for obvious reasons, to the increasingly widespread opposition to the police state brutality. In unifying the struggle against Emmanuel Macron’s dictatorial decrease in the living stands of French workers with the struggle against murderous police, the workers must raise the call for a political general strike.