Police violence: 20,000 demonstrators in Paris and rallies in Lille, Lyon and Marseille – 20 minutes
“Justice for Adama, Selom and Matisse! “: Some 2,500 people, according to a police source, participated Tuesday in Lille to a demonstration, not declared, to denounce the police violence, racism and paying homage to George Floyd, noted an AFP journalist.
“From Adama Traore to Georges Floyd, same institution, same struggle! “,” Black Lives Matter “,” The police are murdering! Said in particular the signs held up by the demonstrators, mostly young and often masked.
Gathered at 6 p.m. in front of the prefecture, they responded to a call launched on social networks and relayed in particular by the “Sélom et Matisse collective”, formed after the death in 2017 in Lille of two young people of 20 and 18 years old, struck by a TER while the police were intervening in the neighborhood.
“We talk about the United States as if it never happened here”
The demonstrators also came to “support the demonstration of the collective” The truth for Adama “” organized at the same time before the Paris Tribunal de Grande Instance by the sister of Adama Traoré, who died in a barracks in Persian (Val d’Oise) in 2016 after his arrest. Called a simple “rally,” the participants finally made their way to the city center, where they paraded quickly and in dispersed order, but generally calmly, chanting “everyone hates the police” or “police everywhere, nowhere justice ”.
“” I can’t breathe anymore “were the last words of Adama Traoré (…)” I can’t breathe “(” I can’t breathe “) were the last words of Georges Floyd”, lamented a sign, referring to the death of this 46-year-old black American asphyxiated by a white police officer, which sparked a wave of protests in the United States.
“We are talking about the United States as if it never happened here. Here, the Minister of the Interior himself assures us that it does not exist. But what we saw during the movement of “yellow vests”, brutality, mutilation, it has been decades that working class neighborhoods have suffered! “, Regretted Mélanie, 34, denouncing a” systemic racism “in France. “I, too, am afraid of the police! All the time ! I have no confidence at all, “said Candice, 21, referring to the words of singer Camélia Jordana who accused the police at the end of May on France 2 of” massacring “men and women for their skin color. The demonstration dispersed calmly a little before 8:30 p.m.
