Three Paris police officers went on trial Monday for beating Michel Zecler, a Black music producer, about 30 times in four minutes inside his own studio. Their arrest report said Zecler had insulted and resisted them. Security-camera footage showed otherwise.
That gap is the case. Zecler has said that without the cameras, the police reports could have sent him to prison. Footage obtained by the outlet Loopsider and released five days after the Nov. 21, 2020 beating contradicted the officers’ version. Two of the officers spent a month in jail afterward. Zecler’s lawyer says all four admitted to excessive force.
The officers had stopped Zecler outside his studio for not wearing a mask during the COVID lockdown and on suspicion of cannabis use, then pushed him inside. The beating ruptured a tendon in his left biceps. The three on trial are charged with intentional violence committed by a group and with falsifying a public document, which carries a sentence of up to 15 years.
What the trial will not examine is the part Zecler says he cannot forget. He has said officers used racist abuse during the attack. In June 2025, investigating judges sent the case to trial without the racist aggravation, saying the evidence was lacking. His lawyer, Caroline Toby, said: “We regret that the aggravating circumstance of racism was not retained, despite the evidence gathered.” Zecler plans to testify about the abuse anyway.
Readers in the United States and Canada know this sequence. A Black man is stopped over something minor. The police report describes a threat. A camera describes something else. The report is the first version that reaches a prosecutor, a judge and the press, and for anyone without video it is often the only one. Zecler was a working producer at his own door, and he still needed footage to be believed.
The falsification charge matters as much as the violence charge. A beating is rarely the whole offense: the paperwork that follows is what lets it stand. If the court convicts the officers on that count, it will say what Black defendants have long said, that the lie on the page was part of the harm.
The trial is before the Paris criminal court. Zecler is expected to testify about the beating, and about the abuse the judges declined to charge.
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