FBI raids researcher who discovered private patient data on public server (2016)

> The scale of police violence was astonishing and stomach-churning. Between November 2018 and June 2019, according to figures compiled by Médiapart, 860 protesters were injured by the police – 315 suffered head injuries; 24 lost the use of an eye; and five had hands torn off. In December 2018, an elderly woman who had no involvement in the protests was killed when police threw a grenade into her flat.

> Among these victims are not only protesters but also journalists and medics. Police have been filmed beating elderly and disabled people, as well as using tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets against peaceful protesters. The main source of injuries was ‘Flashball’ rubber bullets – a non-lethal weapon that has been banned in every EU country except France. More than 13,000 of these bullets were fired in the first three months of the protests. Another extreme weapon used by police was the GLI-F4 – a teargas grenade which contains explosives that maimed numerous protesters. The grenade was eventually banned by the French government in early 2020.

> Things got so bad that the UN called for a ‘full investigation’ into the police’s ‘excessive use of force’. Similarly, the Council of Europe’s human-rights commissioner called for an end to the use of Flashballs against protesters. Amnesty International denounced the ‘extremely heavy-handed’ policing deployed against peaceful protesters. Eventually, even the French government acknowledged it had a problem with police violence.

"you really don’t understand anything about the gendarmerie" is an interesting take for someone who ignores a paramilitary group that throws grenades at grannies, blinds people and tears off hands, and beats the elderly and disabled.

> To compare it with the American policing model is beyond ludicrous.

Au contraire, I don't remember the American police beating up the elderly and disabled - or creating disabled people - en masse, in such a short space of time. Maybe you do, but it wouldn't make the comparison ludicrous. Dismissing it, however…

[1] https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/02/do-french-lives-mat...

Edit: grenades at grannies, not grenades at grenades. The real mistake was giving the police grenades in the first place though.

First, the numbers are indeed atrocious. But they're the result of massive civil unrest which included mass civil disobedience, occasional looting and burning private property, and fighting with police ( so it wasn't just the police randomly shooting at people) which went on for months, which explains some of it.

Second, the numbers are for the police and gendermerie violence, (the latter helped because the civil unrest was massive, at the start it was mostly police). You can't just pin them all on the gendermerie because you have a preconceived notion they're the problem.

> Au contraire, I don't remember the American police beating up the elderly and disabled - or creating disabled people - en masse, in such a short space of time. Maybe you do, but it wouldn't make the comparison ludicrous

The model is different, and so are the consequences, which I wasn't talking about. US police are barely trained, suffer no consequences, and have military grade equipment. None of that applies even to the "militarised" (for you) gendermerie.

In France there was unrest, people destroying property and fighting police occasionally as a part of it. Police responded hard after initially doing nothing. Again, it was initially police, and then the gendermerie was also sent to help. Violence was done by both of them.