PARIS — Police tear gas broke the 14-year-old’s jaw and several of his teeth. The officer who fired the shots was arrested a week later and charged with violent mutilation, punishable by up to 15 years in prison. After the operation, the boy can no longer speak and can only eat through a straw, his mother explains.
Other teens have also suffered life-changing injuries blamed on police weapons during nationwide protests by high school students demanding more funding for dilapidated schools. In the former mining town of Lens, a 15-year-old boy lost a hand in an incident involving a police stun grenade. In Tours, in the Loire wine region, the prosecutor says a police riot operation is suspected in the partial blinding of a 16-year-old.
Beyond physical injuries, the widespread use of police arrests and tactics that government critics and human rights activists accuse of being needlessly violent are giving a generation of French schoolchildren — and soon voters — a real education about state power and their rights as citizens, and how the two sometimes clash.
“It politicizes you at an incredible speed,” said Alexis Baudelin, a Paris-based lawyer for more than a dozen young people in police custody.
“For many of them – for all of them – it was one of the first times they had participated in a protest, coming together in a public space to express demands they considered legitimate.”
Police arrested thousands of young people
According to the Interior Ministry, police have made more than 6,600 arrests – mostly people under the age of 18 – since protests began to gain momentum last week, including 488 people arrested during Tuesday’s nationwide demonstrations. The movement demanding increased funding and more replacement teachers in schools began at a high school in the Paris region in mid-September.
Lawyers and researchers who study French policing warn that a heavy-handed response could result in disillusioned young adults embittered against the Republic and its promises of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”
Attorney Baudelin said his young clients got a crash course in “unbridled police violence.”
“Being locked up for hours and hours with nothing, in cells that are mostly extremely unsanitary, in police stations that smell bad, where you can’t sleep, with police officers who tell you that if you don’t speak, if you don’t tell the truth, threaten you, tell you that your life will be ruined,” he said.
“It’s an experience that can be deeply traumatic and completely disproportionate.”
Use of some hanging police grenades
Faced with a growing outcry, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez announced Wednesday that the model of stun grenade suspected of having mutilated the teenager from Lens will no longer be used against high school students, given, according to him, a “strong possibility” that such a weapon was involved in tearing off the student’s hand.
“We need to understand exactly what happened,” Nunez said.
Nonetheless, he also defended police actions as proportionate in “almost all cases”. He says police were forced to intervene when protests led to riots, vandalism and other violence, and that they did so keeping in mind that they were largely dealing with children.
“We do not manage a movement of high school students in the same way as a movement of adults,” the minister declared to the RTL channel.
In the case of the 14-year-old boy, with his jaw and teeth shattered, the police officer who fired directly at him with his grenade launcher during a demonstration in Saint-Ouen l’Aumone, northwest of Paris, declared during his interrogation in police custody that he had acted in “a fraction of a second” to protect a colleague who had exchanged blows with the boy, according to a press release from the prosecutor’s office in charge of the investigation.
He called the officer’s actions disproportionate, leading to a preliminary charge against him of violence committed by a public official resulting in mutilation or permanent disability. Suspended from duty and banned from carrying a firearm, he is the first officer likely to be prosecuted in 18 investigations opened so far into suspicions of police misconduct during the protests.
The boy, Eden, sent his mother a video from outside his school, showing police and protesters, moments before the officer shot him with the gas grenade, she said, speaking to The Associated Press and other media outlets on condition that she not be identified to preserve her child’s anonymity.
But when she next called him, it was one of his classmates who answered, screaming that her son had been punched in the face and that he was on the ground, bleeding with his jaw and top teeth broken and his bottom teeth “completely knocked out,” she said.
“It’s shameful, it’s appalling, it’s violent, it’s disgusting, it’s vile, I could give you a whole list of words,” she said. “They take care of children. And the children ask for what? Simply better conditions to study.”
Teenagers appear more provocative
In the crowd that demonstrated Tuesday in Paris, marching noisily from one square to another, AP found three teenagers from the Ile-de-France region who said they had been arrested, handcuffed, searched, placed in police custody then released without charge last week.
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