Police Arrested Over Fatal Shooting in Paris, While Union Protest

Hundreds of members of French police unions demonstrated on Monday after one of their members was detained in connection with the fatal shooting of two people in a car on Paris’ Pont-Neuf bridge on election night, April 24. A group of three police unions called the arrest of one of their members “inadmissible.” They said they would take to the streets in 40 cities to show their anger, focusing on courts and police stations.

The largest gathering, however, was planned for the Place Saint-Michel, which is near the shooting site on the Pont-Neuf. The police want to make sure that when they act in self-defense, the government will back them up. They say this is because they are afraid that the government won’t be able to back them up when they act in the line of duty.

When a car failed to halt for a checkpoint on the bridge in central Paris on that fateful evening, the officer in question discharged his rifle at it. Two of the car’s occupants perished on the spot, while the third was injured. The officer claimed he was acting in self-defense when he fired his weapon. In the local media, there has been no mention of whether any of the people in the car were armed or otherwise posed a threat to the officer. The case’s facts are still unknown.

The internal investigative agency took the 24-year-old cop in for questioning right away. Prosecutors have speculated that he may have used excessive force. According to the news agency AFP, the police report corroborated the number of shots fired, with five or six bullets striking the victims out of the 12 or so rounds fired. The officer was charged with killing the driver of the car, “violent violence by a person holding public authority” that led to his death, and “violent violence voluntarily aggregated by a person holding public authority” that led to the death of the front-seat passenger, who was also killed. The back-seat passenger was also injured, but he survived.

Counter-protesters joined the conflict in some spots not long after the cops took to the streets, decrying police aggression and accusing the officers of being murderers. In France, tensions between the authorities and the general public have been high for years. Weeks of Yellow Vest protests have given way to anti-COVID-19 and now anti-Macron election protests. At May Day protests and demonstrations against Macron’s reelection, dozens of people were arrested.