Some cracking video clips for you to watch and repost,courtesy of Belleville Blogue:

For those of you who can’t be bothered, here’s the gist of what happened outside East Paris’ Rafal Primary School according to local English blogger Petite Anglaise :

Police arrested an elderly Chinese man on Tuesday evening. On his way to collect his grandchildren from another school in the neighbourhood, he was handcuffed and bundled violently into a car when a spot ID check revealed he didn’t have residence papers. …

Within minutes an indignant crowd had gathered, surrounding the police car to prevent it from leaving. Some protesters lay down across the zebra crossing. Other tapped on the roof. All chanted “lâchez-le! [let him go!]” Police reinforcements were duly brought in, threats were made to unleash police dogs on the crowd, and finally tear gas was used to disperse the protesters and allow the police vehicles to leave.

The disturbing institutionalised racism and importance ofID papers shown in this video have a long and deep history in France, but we shouldn’t get too smug. We, after all, have prisons for asylum seekers.

It’s reassuring to see some resistance, for once, to the racist police state that most of the West seems to be sleepwalking into. The police should have known they were crossing a line; school is revered in French society as the “Temple de la République”, and much of the wider polemic has been more about the fact that it happened in front of the school gates than the fact that it happened at all. Despite this tradition, and police guidelines, the school gates have increasingly been police targets, where foreign-lookin’ parents of foreign-lookin’ children are like fish in a barrel.

Arrests like these have escalated dramatically over the past weeks, as Interior Minister and likely (until today, I’d have said almost certainly; now I have a glimmer of hope) almost future president Nicolas “Petit Fachô” Sarkozy frets that his immigrant-expulsion rates may be lower this quarter than last quarter, damaging his popularity in the run up to the presidential elections. As all the other presidential candidates fall over each other to condemn the incident, he has shrugged it off as “really nothing worth getting polemic about”.

But this incident has been all the more remarkable as it showcases another form of resistance. If surveillance is watching from above, watching from below is sousveillance; just as new technologies give governments new ways to spy on and control us, so too do they empower citizens to watch that government when it doesn’t necessarily want to be watched. If only French youths with cameraphones were wandering through the streets of Gaza, Ecuador or Tehran the Official Truth might be put squarely in its place.

On the power of sousveillance, Sarko is two steps ahead of the game. Just as Britain’s New Labour quietly used the protection of women from stalkers as a pretext for criminalising peaceful protest, so has France’s ruling coalition (UMP) seized the opportunity provided by le happy slapping. 16 years to the day after LAPD officers were filmed kicking and beating Rodney King to death, recording and broadcasting acts of violence became illegal in France. Technically, the people whose video clips are now bouncing around the internet could face 5 years in the old StaJa.

They were perhaps unaware of the risks they were taking, as this law has enjoyed very little coverage in the mainstream media, but these cameraphoners were doing a great public service. Without the sensation they caused in the French blogsphere (and will perhaps go on to cause in the wider blogsphere), it is hard to see the mainstream media giving this story any real attention. Protests always go underreported, for obvious reasons.

For the record, the Chinese gentleman in question was released the day after his arrest, as was the headmistress taken in for swearing at policemen and reopening the school to treat the injured.