“Au nom du maintien de l’ordre” is now online on ARTE.
The documentary looks at policing doctrines from Seattle in 1999 to the Gilets Jaunes and the Hamburg G20. A film by Paul Moreira (Premières Lignes) with whom Marc Meillassoux (DeepDocs) on the German chapter (Investigation, production and camera).
How did we evolve from policing to crowd control that resembles low-intensity warfare? The documentary examines the new doctrines of policing, giving the floor to numerous witnesses and specialists, including police officials and vendors of “reduced lethality weapons”.
Combining their disarmingly frank comments with sometimes harsh immersion in processions in France, Germany and the United States, these two episodes demonstrate that this evolution in the control of demonstrators, symbolized by the massive and uncontrolled use of rubber bullet weapons, is the result of schemes thought out and accepted by police hierarchies. Fear is spreading through the processions, and it’s clear and worrying that this repressive shift is threatening civil liberties.
