LBD shooting of Jean-François Martin: the police officer identified through 3D modelling

On 28 April 2016, in the early afternoon, several thousand protesters marched against the Labour Law through the centre of Rennes. Near the banks of the Vilaine river, tensions flared between protesters and police. The officers used tear gas and fired several shots from LBD 40 launchers, police weapons firing 40 mm rubber projectiles. At 1:09 pm, one of these shots crossed the river and struck a man in the face. Jean-François Martin, a 20-year-old student, collapsed in the street. The injury would cost him his left eye.

The inquiry opened after the victim filed a complaint established that only two of the officers at the scene were carrying LBDs. But nothing in it specifies which of the two fired the shot that caused the injury. Four years after the events, on 29 May 2020, the investigating judge in charge of the case dismissed it, on the grounds that the inquiry had “not made it possible to identify the perpetrators of the LBD shot that struck Jean-François Martin”. He immediately appealed.

In April 2021, as part of these appeal proceedings, Jean-François Martin’s lawyer, Arié Alimi, contacted Index to work on a counter-investigation. Using the many photos and videos taken at the time, the aim was to examine the LBD shots identifiable in the images and, as far as possible, to determine which of the two officers carrying LBDs had fired the shot that cost Jean-François Martin his eye.

Index began with extensive open-source research online (OSINT) to add to the visual material in the case file. By the end of it, the images available for this counter-investigation comprised seven videos filmed by witnesses, some twenty photographs taken by journalists, and stills from surveillance footage shot from a gendarmerie helicopter.

These images were then synchronised, using the timestamp on the helicopter footage as the reference. A detailed analysis of the images captured around 1:09 pm – when Jean-François Martin was injured – then made it possible to identify five LBD shots compatible with his injury.

For each shot, using the available images, Index reconstructed the precise position of the shooter and of his weapon’s muzzle in a 3D model of the scene, so as to model each trajectory in space.

This made it possible to place the five LBD shots in the 3D model of the scene. Examining them one by one, Index found that only one crossed the area where Jean-François Martin was standing when he was injured, while another passed close to it. Both were fired by the same officer, Anthony P. As for the second officer carrying an LBD, Nicolas P., his three shots were aimed at the middle of the footbridge, far from where Jean-François Martin was standing.

On 31 August 2021, Index submitted its expert report to Arié Alimi’s law firm. In the conclusion of the document, which sets out each step of its analysis, the NGO wrote:

“[I]t is highly probable that police officer Antony P. fired the LBD shot that caused Mr Martin’s injury.”

Jean-François Martin’s appeal was heard by the Rennes Court of Appeal’s investigating chamber in September 2021. Besides submitting it in evidence, Arié Alimi recalls having “argued at length on the elements provided by Index’s report” – the only new material in the case file since the first-instance dismissal.

In November 2021 – a rare event in a police violence case – the Rennes investigating chamber overturned the first-instance dismissal and ordered police officer Anthony P. to stand trial before the criminal court (tribunal correctionnel) – the very officer Index’s expert report had identified as the highly probable author of the LBD shot that cost Jean-François Martin his eye. At the time, the complainant said the decision had “the smell of victory”.

But the officer swiftly appealed to the Court of Cassation, France’s highest court. A few months later, the Rennes ruling was quashed on a procedural defect: the officer had not been placed under formal investigation (mise en examen) before being sent to trial. Six years after the events, the case was transferred to another Court of Appeal.

“We were sent back before the investigating chamber of Angers, and there everything was re-examined – unfortunately in the wrong direction,” says Arié Alimi. On 22 February 2023, the Angers Court of Appeal upheld the first-instance dismissal. In its reasoned ruling, the chamber held that the use of the LBD by officers of the Rennes police Intervention Section, as flares were landing near their position, constituted “a proportionate use of force”.

The decision is surprising. In his statements to the IGPN, the police’s internal affairs body, officer Anthony P. confirms that he fired his LBD towards the opposite quay, more than 40 m away – whereas the electronic sight on his LBD is normally set for 25 m. His statements also show that he was not aiming at any particular individual but fired at a group: “I fired at people who were throwing projectiles. I cannot describe them to you, they were all dressed the same, dressed in black, hoods, etc. I cannot tell you whether I hit my targets at that moment,” he told investigators, according to transcripts of his questioning that Index has seen. This is a clear breach of the rules on the use of the LBD 40, a weapon that may only be fired at a specific target – “a violent and/or dangerous person”. In other words, the Angers Court of Appeal’s dismissal exempts from criminal liability a police officer whose improper use of his LBD very probably left a man maimed.

The decision should also be seen against the whole judicial history of the Jean-François Martin case. After the victim filed his complaint, the first court decision took four years to come, and it was a dismissal, on the grounds that the officer responsible could not be identified. Had that been the end of it, the case would have looked like many other police violence cases. But here, Index’s independent counter-investigation – the work of a civil society organisation – identified the officer responsible in just three months, removing the obstacle that had justified the courts’ refusal to prosecute. The judicial process resumed. After two more years of proceedings, the courts once again found no grounds to prosecute – this time for a different reason. It was no longer that the officer responsible could not be identified (on this point, the Angers ruling does not call Index’s expert report into question); this time, the court closed the case because it considered the officers’ “use” of the LBD legitimate, given the hostility they were allegedly facing at the time. The reasoning changed along the way, but the decision stayed the same: not to prosecute the officer.

Since Jean-François Martin’s case, the number of people who have lost an eye to an LBD shot during a protest has soared.

According to the unified count compiled by the website violencespolicieres.fr, 29 people are reported to have lost an eye after being struck in the face by an LBD shot since November 2018, most of them during the crackdown on the Yellow Vests movement.

The 2016 protests against the Labour Law marked a turning point in the use of the LBD, which went from the exception to the rule in public order policing. Before that, the weapon had long been largely confined to working-class neighbourhoods. Widely issued to BAC plainclothes anti-crime units by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy from 2002, the rubber-bullet launcher – also known as the Flash-Ball, after one of the first models – had by 2016 become “emblematic of the way policing is done in the suburbs”, according to sociologist Fabien Jobard.

Serious LBD injuries in working-class neighbourhoods are numerous. According to a report by the NGO ACAT, between 2005 and March 2016, rubber-bullet launchers were responsible for at least 39 serious injuries, “most of them to the face”, the report states, recording 21 people “who lost an eye or the use of an eye”, as well as one “man hit in the chest by a shot at close range [who] died in December 2010”. The collective Désarmons-les, whose regular count of people maimed by the police goes back to 2005, recorded 24 people who lost an eye to an LBD shot between 2005 and 2014. After 2016, when it became a routine public order weapon, the LBD continued to be used in the suburbs. The case of Adnane Nassih, who lost an eye to a BAC officer’s LBD shot in Brunoy (Essonne) in 2020, was the subject of a video investigation by Index in partnership with Libération.

In the absence of precise public official data, the most complete figures on injuries caused by French police weapons come from the various counts kept by civil society.

Cross-referencing these counts, it appears that between 2005 and 2023 at least 55 people lost an eye to an LBD shot.