"What is the problem, why has the police come to hit us, why are they aggressive with our group? We need to know."

The respondents are a group of six people who live together in an informal camp in the woods, in Calais. 

“One evening in May, the police arrived at our living site in two cars. One of them was an unmarked car with two police officers without uniforms, the other vehicle was a police van with three police officers (one woman and two men) in uniform. Some of us were awake. One of us shouted “Hey, police is coming“, and four people were able to run away. If they hadn’t run away, we are sure, the police would have hit all of us. The people who had escaped were hiding on the street behind the camp, because there is a security camera there, which made them feel safer.  

Two people in our group were still sleeping and were woken up by the police entering their tent. The authorities started to hit them with sticks and to pepper spray them. One of the men asked what was happening, as the torchlight came directly in his eyes and he wasn’t able to see. One of the men in the group also asked, “Who are you?”, and was answered “I am police”. While one of the men was beaten up by the female police officer, she repeatedly asked him for his ID card, for his passport, but the whole time she continued to hit him. She was speaking Arabic without a foreign accent. She shouted “Come back, come back!” to the men that had run away.

One of the men that was beaten up is currently sick, the police hit him too much. He is shivering with fever. He has a big oedema in his leg, so he can’t walk. Also, his hand and fingers are hurting a lot. Later in the night that day, he called an ambulance. The ambulance came, but they didn’t want to take him, because he didn’t have papers, he is from Africa. In the end, volunteers of an association active in Calais took him to the hospital. In the emergency ward nobody helped him, they just left him there for a long time. He was worried and contacted a friend. He went back to the living site, because nobody helped him. Now he’s sick and staying tired in the jungle. 

Another man in the group had been pepper sprayed in the eyes, and they are still red and swollen. He was also hit with a truncheon by the police. His leg is hurting. 

We had five tents that we were sharing. The police pepper sprayed all of them, including our pillows, mattresses, sleeping bags and several small bags. When we tried to touch them afterwards, we experienced difficulty with breathing, burning on the skin and eyes. We cannot use them anymore. When the police stopped attacking us, they said: “You should look for another place, you can’t stay in this place“. After that, they left. 

Half an hour later, another four police officers in uniform arrived. We stayed on the street behind the jungle, because we thought that maybe the police had come to hit us again. We felt safer because of the camera that is installed there. The police men asked us why we were there and what had happened. We told them about the incident and went inside the tent together, we showed them the spray and everything. But the officers just said “okay“ and went away. 

We recognized some of the officers that had come to beat us up (including the police woman). They had come before and destroyed two phones, and took a power bank from people in this group, while they were charging their devices next to our camp. 

We all have one question: What is the problem, why have the police come to hit us, why are they aggressive with our group? We need to know. The police also told us aggressively “we don’t want to see you here again”. We are worried that they will come back, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. We don’t know where to go. We need to move to another place, all of us want to do that, but we don’t know where to go. We are one group. We can’t go to another jungle and stay behind another group, nobody likes us, Nobody lets us stay, they would be aggressive against us or fight us with knives. We don’t have tents, mattresses or sleeping bags anymore and don’t know how to sleep and stay safe at night."