While the BRAV-M unit is implicated in several cases of police violence, Laurent Nuñez, the prefect of police of Paris, declared this Saturday that its dissolution was “not on the agenda”.
The BRAV-M will not be dissolved. In any case, not for the moment. This is what Laurent Nuñez, guest on France Info, said this Saturday. Despite the fact that this unit has been extremely decried lately for their tough intervention methods and under the influence of several legal inquiries, the prefect of police of the city of Paris insisted on supporting it: “The behavior of a few individuals should not cast opprobrium on a whole unit which, in recent years, and particularly at the moment, has proved its usefulness”.
#TrueInfo | “The Brav-M are police officers who are trained to maintain order. The Brav-M is an essential unit for the maintenance of republican order”.@NunezLaurentat the microphone of @franceinfo.#YourSecurityOurDaily pic.twitter.com/QYcXgHWdJ0
— Prefecture of Police (@prefpolice) March 25, 2023
The BRAV-M are police units circulating on motorcycles to ensure the maintenance of order during demonstrations in Paris, being more mobile than the CRS companies or the mobile gendarmes. Their mission is to contact the thugs to stop the damage and challenge them.
Laurent Nuñez also adds that “the police and the gendarmes intervene in a degraded context, where they receive projectiles. They are trained to endure all this, to retaliate and challenge thugs” and that these interventions are necessary when “there are abuses and serious attacks on property and people”.
A unit at the heart of controversy
On Friday March 24, the prefect of police announced that he had seized the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN) after the broadcast of an audio recording, obtained by Le Monde and Loopsider, in which we hear police officers, presented as members of BRAV-M, making insulting and humiliating remarks towards seven young demonstrators whom they had just arrested.
In a twenty-minute audio recording that Loopsider obtained, several Brav-M police officers threaten and intimidate seven young people arrested Monday evening after a demonstration against the pension reform. Here is a part of this edifying document. pic.twitter.com/dvWDZbGQSb
—Loopsider (@Loopsidernews) March 24, 2023
The Paris prosecutor’s office for its part opened a judicial investigation on Saturday for “willful violence by persons holding public authority and threats of crime”, following a report received in the afternoon.
Two other judicial investigations were opened this week and entrusted to the IGPN following two complaints against BRAV-M police officers. The first was filed by a woman who was beaten with a truncheon on Monday evening by a helmeted police officer, when she seemed motionless, stuck against a wall with other people in the Châtelet district, according to a video posting on social networks. The second concerns the punch struck by a police officer in the face of a demonstrator the same evening, captured by a video widely relayed on the internet.
Several deputies of France Insoumise even called this week for the dissolution of this brigade. A petition has even been created by Internet users to go in the same direction. It reached, this Saturday, March 25, about 16,000 signatures.
