We can only wish it were a comedy.
Last week, three Paris police officers spent several minutes beating up a Black music producer, Michael Zecler, outside a basement studio at his home.
A fourth officer thought he would help out by tossing a tear-gas grenade into the tiny anteroom of the studio where the others were scuffling, presumably hoping to drive everyone outdoors.
It was all caught on full-color CCTV.
The video quickly spread on social media. The rest of France had questions, largely variations on "WTF?"
There were protests against police violence across the nation on both Friday and Saturday, and France's president, Emmanuel Macron, said the video had shamed the country. Even the police officers' defense lawyer says that he thought "Have they all gone crazy?"
The three police officers said that Zecler was resisting arrest and maintained that they had not made racial insults, although a witness affirmed that they had. Zecler’s lawyer said that the police officers “are lying at every level.”
Those officers remain in custody this week, the government prosecutor said, so that they couldn't talk to each other. The fourth officer is suspended and "under judicial control," according to a Huffpo article.
We can't help but notice that the Parisian justice system took the incident much more seriously than we usually see for police brutality investigations in the United States.
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