Sentences of six to eighteen months of suspended imprisonment. Seven police officers from the Night Anti-Crime Squad (BAC) of Nancy were sentenced on Friday, May 13, for “moral harassment” of four ex-colleagues on whom they were pressuring “to leave on their own” of the service, from 2015 to 2018. The Nancy Criminal Court also imposed fines of up to 2,000 euros for four of the police officers for racist insults towards a colleague.
The court also issued bans on the exercise of the police profession for the seven convicted, including a final one for the one who had been described during the trial in March as the leader. The ban is five years for one of the officers, two years for two officers and one year for the other three. Three of the ten defendants were released.
In total, ten police officers appeared in mid-March, including nine for moral harassment and racist insults. The public prosecutor had called for prohibitions to practice for four of them and required up to 18 months suspended sentence, evoking a “mass bullying” on the part of the defendants and qualifying their behavior as “exclusive machine that grinds a woman and three men”.
“Justice has passed and the message is clear: racism has no place in the police, harassment has no place in the administration and in labor relations”greeted the lawyer for the four civil parties on Friday. “The sentences are fair. It is not tolerable that racist and deviant elements take control of a police service (…), there is no question of the Republic allowing itself to be vampirized by rogue cops”, added Frederic Berna. The lawyer for eight of the defendants, Juliette Grosset, did not wish to speak.
During the trial, the four civil parties had mentioned their progressive exclusion within the service during their stay at the night BAC in Nancy. “They destroyed me, I lived a nightmare”said one of the victims, the only woman in the group between 2013 and 2017. Another victim, of North African origin, was the subject of regular racist insults in a Messenger conversation which brought together the police officers of the service and from which she was excluded. “Nonsense”, “stupidity”had defended the defendants who had denied any desire to harm.