Published on :
Since February 12, several videos of police violence have been shared by French-speaking Twitter accounts and sometimes seen more than 80,000 times. Some of this violence took place during the demonstration of February 12, 2022 in Paris, others are in fact much older and have no connection with the “freedom convoy”.
Verification in a nutshell
- Several authentic videos of police violence committed during the demonstrations of February 12, 2022 are circulating on social networks.
- Among the real images, some having nothing to do with this demonstration slipped among the authentic publications using the hashtag #Manifs12Fevrier.
- Two videos of police violence have thus been shared several times on Twitter, garnering 2,000 and 4,000 retweets respectively, but these images actually date from 2019.
- They were taken during demonstrations of yellow vests, long before the “freedom convoy”, and have since resulted in convictions.
Verification details
“#Manifs12Fevrier the police are incredibly violent”. On Twitter, many French-speaking accounts this weekend shared images of violence committed during demonstrations linked to the “freedom convoy”.
As evidenced the publications of journalists present on sitesome violence was actually perpetrated by police officers and an administrative investigation has also been opened by the Paris police headquarters after a video showed a policeman pointing his gun at a protester.
But among these very many publications linked to the hashtag #Manifs12Fevrier, some older images shot in 2019 during the Yellow Vests movement have slipped.
Video 1 : a man in CRS uniform who hits a yellow vest
In the first video, a policeman in CRS uniform hits a man wearing a yellow vest with his truncheon and hits him in the face. Several clues indicate that this scene was probably not shot on February 12, 2022. For example, the people present in the video are not wearing masks and are not dressed in winter outfits.
To verify the exact origin of this video, it is therefore possible to carry out a reverse image search (see here how to proceed). This Google search returns to articles published in 2019 by several French media. We find there the same video which was actually shot on March 30, 2019 in Besançon, during a demonstration of yellow vests.
Thanks to the keywords “2019 Besançon Yellow Vests”, it is possible to find articles reporting the conviction of the police officer present in the video. On February 11, 2022, he was found guilty of assaulting the protester in question.
Video 2: a protester thrown to the ground by a police officer
The second video was also published the day after the demonstrations of February 12, 2022. We see a man being thrown to the ground by several police officers, then receiving a kick in the head from one of them. But again the absence of masks suggests that these images do not date from February 12, 2022.
If the Google reverse image search does not give a convincing result, the TinEye tool makes it possible to find the trace of these images in the article “Hello Place Beauvau” published by Mediapart.
This article tells us that these images were shot on the Place du Trocadéro, on February 23, 2019, during the fifteenth Parisian demonstration of the Yellow Vests. And there again, one of the police officers in the video was eventually convicted in November 2020 for this violence.
If you would like to report a photo or video to us for verification, please do not hesitate to contact us via the Twitter account @InfoIntoxF24.