Toulouse riots

On Sunday, March 25, 2007 far right presedential candidate Jean Marie Le Pen visited Toulouse. He held a meeting for his Front National political party. The local press reports that 300 Toulousain took to the streets during and after the visit to protest the arrival of the controversial politician. 10 people were arrested, 1 policeman was injured, several plastic bins were burned, a number of bottles thrown, teargas canisters fired, slogans were chanted etc. The whole event must have cost a small fortune for the local authorities; 200 police officers were mobilized, fire engines, ambulances and police helicopters. Early skirmishes were centred around the 'multi-cultural' Arnaud-Bernard area of Toulouse, the kerfuffle then moved to the centre of Toulouse and to Rue Lafayette on one side (The McDonald's side for want of a better descriptor) of the Captiole as seen in the pics above.

My interest in this relatively minor demonstration, described as 'stupid' by one police officer I spoke to, is twofold. Firstly, I took photos. I also twittered. 10 twitters in all, 8 of which were from the scene of the riot, although I didn't take the video you see above. If I'd remembered my iPod Micromemo I would've also recorded interviews with people. But, here's where it might (I emphasize might) get slightly spooky.

I am a journalist and I do have an international press card. However, Sunday is the first time I've ever been asked to show it to the police. Considering I normally write about new media/blogging and food it felt a bit odd to be asked to show my credentials which I unusually decided to slip into my jacket before I left the house.

A new French law came into force this month. It makes it illegal for regular joes to record acts of violence. The consequences could be potentially very serious,

"The penalty: up to five years in prison and fines of more than 70,000 euros."  According to Poynter.

I uploaded a bunch of snaps to my flickr account within one hour of me first twittering/taking snaps. One commenter and fellow riot observer/recorder tells me,

i got all the photos and videos i took yesterday on my camphone deleted by a policeman who told me he would arrest if he ever saw me doing again. I don't know if he had the right to erase the photos, i should see about that.

Forgetting linguistic barriers for a minute, when I was approached by the police officer he pointed at my camera in a manner that suggested I should give the camera to him. Instead, I showed him my press card and played the dumb foreigner. This whole brief and to be honest completely undisturbing episode got me thinking about the new law and how it might be interpreted on the streets. I'll be looking at this in more depth over the coming week as I have a story to write about it for the British press. If you have any information about this new law and how it is being interpreted during or (possibly more importantly) after the events that are recorded by regular joes, please drop me a line.

The second point that interests me from a practical point of view is how a combination of twitter/blog/flickr/crowdsourcing can aid the reporter in best reporting the raw facts and then help develop a story. I think the idea of a Twitter network has legs for journalists/editors. Blogs are well proven as are Flickr, YouTube et al - and remember if I hadn't uploaded these pics to Flickr I might never have found out (or it might have taken me longer to find out) that the police were actively deleting digital images in Toulouse on Sunday. For the journalist, the skill is in meshing all these tools together in a meaningful way.

I really do not see myself as a 'hard news' journalist, but I am inherently interested in the changing processes behind how news, all news, is reported. Any thoughts on this, lemme know.

UPDATE: Here's how the local TV reported the Le Pen visit

Comments

[Linda]

Very interesting Graham - did you make much off your pics/words? Personally, though my Twitter contacts are a very "select" (small :)) bunch - it's great to see such a variety of stuff popping up through Twitter.
All best.

[ourman]

Fascinating, disturbing and very interesting. I look forward to seeing coverage of it elsewhere.

[Graham]

Hello Linda, no money involved. Although I do have a piece to do for the Press Gazette now and they may use some pics.

I could hear a lot of police sirens from my house and the police helicopter going round and round for an hour or more. Curiosity finally got the better of me, I left the cooking to my wife and went out to see what was going on. France is prone to small riots and that's what I expected to find.

I'm not a snapper - as I think is clear from the photos - however, in retrospect I should have told Kyle at Scoopt straight away, he said he could have sold them. As it is, they're now in the Getty system. However, it seemed pretty minor to me - as I twittered,

http://twitter.com/noodlepie/statuses/12526141

I only started thinking about the new French law when Mo commented on my flickr pics to say he had his camera deleted by the police. For all I know this could be standard practice in France, even before this law was introduced.

Ourman, very much doubt you'll find other coverage on this in any other places other than thos I have linked to. It was localized, relatively small and specific to the visit of Le Pen. It's the interpretation of the new law that is the interesting bit. As Adam from SliceNY commented on flickr,

"erasing your memory card would do little if you were shooting with a mobile phone and uploading somewhere (like, I don't know, Flickr?) almost instantly."

http://flickr.com/photos/noodlepie/433776663/#comment72157600029439599

[Graham]

Just some notes for myself. More chatter on this (in French) here:

http://redforum.propagande.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=17563&start=150

http://www.fdesouche.com/index.php?2007/03/25/1768-heurts-entre-manifestants-anti-le-pen-et-policiers

[Linda]

Hi Graham, I find it very interesting that a journalist of your standing and insight wouldn't think of himself as a "hard news" reporter.

To me, this always has been and always will be the most straighforward 'branch' of journalism - and a good story can tell itself.

I have posted on a new blog about whether people consider themselves "writers, reporters, journalists or hacks" and would love to know your views - it's at:

http://www.freelancewritingtips.com/2007/03/writer_reporter.html

Best wishes,

Linda

[Graham]

"a journalist of your standing"

Please Linda, don't make me laugh :) I'm self taught, whatever that means, I'm struggling to drum up enough work to make journalism viable in France. I can't think of the last story I did that I'd call hard news... Not sure I've ever done one to be honest.

Yes, I'm pretty hip to blogs and new media etc. but being hip does not pay the bills in my experience. At least not yet.

Will go and look at your post. No doubt I can grumble in there for you :)

[Wandering Chopsticks]

Does this only apply to riots or large crowds? I'm thinking of police violence in the US in cases like Rodney King, or several ones in the past few years like the UCLA student who was tasered by school security. The only way those incidents came to light was because of ordinary people recording what happened on their cell phones or video cameras.

[Graham]

This, I think, is the problem: the law is purportedly designed to tackle specific acts of violence, but because of the wording is possibly applicable to many acts of violence including acts of violence perpetrated by the police as in this very recent case,

http://www.latelelibre.fr/index.php/2007/03/des-maternelles-du-xxeme-a-paris-sous-tension/

[Phil]

What a fun day . . .

Cool to see my video posted here, but I must remember to get a press card for the future :)

[WK]

I live in Toulouse - and this is the first time I have heard about the riots - thanks to a blog I was casually looking at on the Daily Telegraph website. Okay - so I haven't gone out of my way to read La Depêche du Midi over the last few days - perhaps it was covered extensively - but all the same I live and work with Toulousains every day and not one person mentioned anything about it....

[Graham]

Well... as you can see in the picture above it was front page news, it was on the TV and the radio, across the blogs and the French forums. Errr... It was difficult, nay impossible, to avoid if you were in the centre of Toulouse on Sunday... Oh and and that'll be Shane's - nice bloke, good blogger.