Byline: Valentin Gendrot; 2020-09-02; Éditions Goutte d'Or;
Article Links"[Gendrot] spent almost six months in a police station in one of Paris’s tough northern arrondissements where relations between the law and locals are strained. In his book, Flic (Cop) published on Wednesday, Gendrot reveals that he was given a uniform and a gun after just three months’ training, and later sent out on patrol. He says he witnessed officers assaulting youngsters – many of them minors – on an almost daily basis. Gendrot describes a “clannish” system that ensures officers close ranks to protect their own, leading to a sense of impunity. “They don’t see a youngster, but a delinquent … once this dehumanisation is established everything becomes justifiable, like beating up an adolescent or a migrant,” he writes, adding: “What astonishes me … is at what point they feel untouchable, as if there’s no superior, no surveillance by the hierarchy, as if a police officer can choose – according to his free will or how he is feeling at that particular moment – to be violent or not." -The Guardian, Sept. 4th 2020