Police Protest in Paris over Govt. Decision to Rewrite Controversial Security Bill (+Video)
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Police Officers held a protest rally in Paris to denounce French President Emmanuel Macron after he called for sweeping police reforms, with his party moving to rewrite a hot-button security bill protecting officers’ identities.
The protest comes as Macron increasingly takes aim at French policing, vowing to “personally intervene” in the matter earlier this month after a pair of controversial video clips emerged showing officers beating up suspects.
In a letter to a national police union last week, the French president vowed a series of reforms in seven areas, including police training, supervision, resources, video footage of interventions, inspections, and relations with the wider population.
Macron’s party, La Republique En Marche, has also drawn the ire of law enforcement after it pledged to partially rewrite a controversial security bill, one provision of which bars citizens from filming on-duty officers and posting the images online with “intent to harm.” Critics of the bill, which was recently adopted by the lower house of parliament, have staged their own protests over the measure for three consecutive weeks, some arguing it could criminalize journalists seeking to document police brutality.
Monday night’s police protest is not the first of its kind in the French capital in recent days, with officers staging another demonstration last Friday. According to a local journalist, the previous protest came after Macron gave an extended interview to French video platform Brut, where he said non-whites are “more likely to get checked by the police,” among other criticisms of law enforcement during the two-hour-plus sit-down