Free Talk Live

Even by the standards of French "community" policing, it is a desperately harrowing video. Filmed by an amateur cameraman, it shows riot police in the notorious Seine-Saint-Denis suburb of Paris breaking up a demonstration by evicted mothers, some of them pregnant. Displaying the kind of respect and sensitivity normally reserved for prone drunks, the officers poke, manhandle and then drag the protestors along the road, along with their crying young children and babies.