The New York Times: Without the video, Michel Zecler believes his case would have been reduced, at most, to a brief news item.
Maybe something like this: “A young man, Black, wearing a sweatshirt and a hood, a shoulder bag, assaulted police officers, attempted to seize their weapons,” Zecler said in an interview Thursday.
“If I didn’t have my cameras, I’d be in prison today,” he added, referring to the security cameras in the vestibule of the building where he keeps his music studio.
The footage from those cameras, showing police officers gratuitously beating Zecler, 41, a producer well known in the world of French rap, has instead helped fuel a political crisis in France and once again turned a spotlight on the issue of police brutality, especially against the country’s minority citizens.
“What shocks me most is not that there are racist elements in the police,” Zecler said. “What amazes me is that they felt confident enough to go that far, in their actions, in their words.”
Zecler spoke with The New York Times in his studio, his first extensive interview since he became the focus of a national uproar that has forced President Emmanuel Macron’s government to scrap and rewrite part of a security bill that would have restricted the filming of police.
During the two-hour interview, Zecler cradled his damaged left arm and sometimes grimaced in pain. He had just returned from one of his many visits to the hospital for the multiple injuries he suffered, including a torn tendon in his arm, a head wound and bruises over his face and body. On Friday, he was due for an operation to repair the tendon.
Critics say a provision in the security bill was aimed at snuffing out precisely the kinds of cellphone videos of police roughing up demonstrators that have brought them under intense new scrutiny.
The video of Zecler’s beating was posted on social media Nov 26 by a French online news site, Loopsider, something that may have been rendered illegal had the law gone through.
