If you thought Ireland had soft sentencing

That’s absolutely horrendous. There’s a grim history of racism by the authorities in France. Much like the Americans, it’s all flags and slogans, like Liberté, Égalité et Fraternité, except when it isn’t. Then it becomes authoritarianism, abuse of power, immunity from prosecution and cover up.

Have a look back at what happened in 1961 in Paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_massacre_of_1961

It’s for reasons like this there’s such a poor relationship between police and citizens and there are incidents that would just shock you to the core.

What happened to that man is utterly unacceptable and just despicable. They should have been prosecuted for rape, assault and quite a few other things too.

Hopefully he takes a case to the ECHR.

You can get a good measure a country and the philosophy of a system of government by looking at how it treats people in custody and whether it’s really willing to bring those in power to account before the law.

Nothing justifies what happened to that guy. It’s extreme police brutality at its very worst and all that sentence does is show that some people are more equal than others before the law and that the system will cover its tracks.

That leads to a sense of unfairness and a broad sense that there’s a racial and classist element to it and that leads to a never ending cycle of severe social instability, riots and so on.

France has situations that you could understand from a Northern Ireland perspective or from the days of the RIC, only they’re arguably aspects of it are far worse.

A significant element of French society does not trust the police, and their history or interaction with the police and the judicial system gives them good reason not to trust either.

That leads to major problems with instability, rioting and lawlessness.

If the law does things like this, it loses respect and that’s basically the crux of a lot of social problems in urban France and they go back a long way. Respect for systems is earned because people trust those systems, not because they fear authority. Much like the U.S. the response isn’t to build bridges or community policing - it’s the CRS, tear gas, water canon, firing baton rounds etc… and it has never worked. The cycle just repeats and repeats.