On Tuesday 29 September 2026, in Nîmes, a 21-year-old man is riding a shared bike on avenue Jean-Lasserre, in front of the Frédéric-Mistral lycée, where a blockade is ending. He is not taking part in the movement. According to his account to Mediapart and ICI Gard, he wants to photograph a bin fire (see the linked entry) when a police officer approaches and gives “a huge kick” to his bike, which falls.
He manages to film about five minutes of the scene (Mediapart). In the extract broadcast, a police officer orders him to put his phone down; the young man says: “He kicked my bike, I was riding” (translated); a police officer replies: “You damage your bike and you say it’s us” (translated), then: “Take your bike and go away.” (translated) The young man then claims to have been pushed back and hit on the chin, and that the police officers refused to give their identification number (RIO).
He filed a complaint the same day at the Nîmes police station for violence by a person holding public authority; the national police directorate told Mediapart that “the public prosecutor’s office has been notified and an investigation has been opened” (translated) (InfOccitanie, 03/10). After Mediapart’s article was published, the Nîmes public prosecutor reacted (InfOccitanie): according to her, the young man “came into contact with the police officers placed on observation and security duty” and “was pushed back along with the city bike on which he was travelling intentionally in the middle of the law enforcement cordon despite requests to move away” (translated). She thus indicates that he was pushed back; she does not rule, in the quotations read, on the blow to the chin or on the kick to the bike. According to InfOccitanie, which describes the video, a police officer replies “I don’t have one” (translated) when he asks for his identification number, and orders him several times to put his phone down and stop filming. The Alliance Police union, through its departmental secretary, claims that he was “in the middle of a police cordon while the situation was very tense with the students”, that he “had no business being there and was hampering law enforcement” (ICI Gard, 04/10) (translated); she considers it inappropriate, in this context, to film the police officers and ask for their identification number. He says since then that he has trouble sleeping.