Investigative Commons talk - Reports on police violence and repression

Hello everyone, and thank you for being here.

This is the discussion on Reports on Police Violence and Repression. With us we have Fransesco from INDEX in France, Paula from Autonoma in Brazil and Dimitra from Forensis in Germany. They are here to describe to us how they use testimony, technological means, investigative methods and lots and lots of work to piece together narratives that break through the official stories surrounding state violence, repression and murder.

I am Chris Gioran, a member of Copwatch GR, the Greek observatory for policing, where for 5 years now we have been building an extensive archive of testimonies of state violence.

When you gather testimony for that long, when you talk with communities that experience policing in its most repressive and violent form, you start to understand the patterns that emerge. And I’m not referring only to patterns of police tactics or about how violence is deployed on the field.

What I’m referring to is patterns of narrative control.

Police violence is not random. It has a specific purpose and it is used for the construction of a specific narrative. Its targets are usually underprivileged groups, people whose voice is not loud enough to break through the mainstream narrative, whose stories are seen as unreliable and biased. In that manufactured environment, the only story that reaches a broad audience is the story told by the state itself and it is presented as the base truth from which all discussion must start, and which cannot be challenged without the risk of being labelled an activist.

On the 8th of July this year, 20 year old Thodoris Zavradinos was murdered by two members of the OPKE crime suppression unit of the Greek police. At least 13 bullets were fired at him, and 2 of them struck him at the back of the head.

Once this event was dissected in the media, once the pundits and the news anchors were finished with their analysis, a familiar conclusion was reached. That while such deaths are unfortunate, it is not the fault of the police. Part of the blame lies with the victim, of course, because he did not comply in the way police demanded of him. And part lies with the lack of training of the police officers, the unmet needs for additional personnel and equipment and the violent nature of the communities police are asked to manage.

I wish I could describe to you the events that lead to Thodori’s death, why the panicked response of a neurodivergent person justified his murder by the police because he didn’t obey hard enough.

Sadly It is impossible to do so. To succeed we would need witnesses to the event, someone to counter the police narrative. But, 2 bullets made certain that the only other person who was there that morning will remain silent forever, his story untold, and the only description we are left with is that of the murderers, their story treated as if it’s the reality of the case.

This inversion of the burden of proof is a common pattern that plays out all over the world. It is used by all governments and relied upon by all police forces. It depends on the ability to flood the zone with manufactured narratives, especially when counter evidence is lacking or fragmented. And fighting against it is hard.

But not impossible.

On 27 June 2023 at 8 in the morning, Nahel Merzouk, aged 17, was killed by a French police officer, who later claimed to have acted in self defence. While there was eyewitness testimony contradicting that claim, it failed to compete with the presumption of innocence that French police officers enjoy by law. However, the team at INDEX put together all available information from cell phone and security camera footage and reconstructed the scene second by second. Once they were done, the facts were laid bare in front of us and the burden of proof was again flipped.

On the night of December 1st of 2019, 9 young people were crushed to death in Sao Paulo after Brazilian military police raided a party and violently pushed the crowd into an alley. The police claimed to have acted in self defence, repeating a story that is all too familiar to residents of the favelas. Only this time there was video evidence. Autonoma used it to reconstruct the scene and show how the police were deployed, creating a counter narrative that not only dismantles the official story, but also highlights the siege tactics they used.

On the 15th of May 2025, during the Nakbah day protest in Berlin, a police officer claimed to have been attacked by the crowd. Immediately, a whole campaign was mounted by the police and the state, asking for additional protections for police officers, stricter measures for protests and the usual calls for new equipment. As Forensis showed however, it was all based on a false, constructed narrative. Video shot by the public dispels any myths propagated by the police about the events that went down that day.

Francesco, Paula and Dimitra will show us how they built these counternarratives. We will hear from them how testimony “from below” can be put together and how, once the victims of police brutality have a chance to tell their story, all that is left to the other side is violence and repression.

Similar efforts have taken place in Greece as well, with Forensic Architecture doing reconstructions of the Moria camp fire, the Pylos shipwreck and the murders of Zak Kostopoulos and Pavlos Fyssas and OmniaTV reconstructing the events of the murder of Nikos Sambanis.

When I see this work, I realize that the police and the state may have access to systemic media, they may operate a vast surveillance apparatus, they may even possess disproportionately advanced technology. All this asymmetry however cannot make up for the fact that their stories suck. And I’m going to leave it to my copanelists to tell us how they told a better story.

Free Palestine and death to Fascism