A policeman broken by years of racism and indifference

There are just winners and losers, and don't you get caught on the wrong side of that line. Bruce Springsteen

William Poiteaux got caught on the wrong side of the line in April 1990, after two weeks as a policeman in the northern Paris slum of Courbevoie.

He's been a loser ever since, a victim of racism, injustice and indifference.

His commanding officer, a policewoman named Marie-France Jubeault, went on patrol with Mr Poiteaux. "She pointed out the shops of north Africans and showed me their vehicles," Mr Poiteaux, now 33, told me in a Paris cafe. A short, chubby man in a black polyester suit, he trembles slightly and his fingernails are chewed to the cuticles.

"She said I had to give them traffic tickets every day, without reason," Mr Poiteaux continued. "[She said] they were Arabs and ought to go home. She said we make the law here, not them."

He refused, and on April 6th, 1990, the mayor of Courbevoie fired him from the police force. Mr Poiteaux filed a lawsuit demanding that he be reinstated, and over four years obtained two court orders to that effect.

But when the town hall finally told him to come back to work in September 1994, Mr Poiteaux was in hospital after a car crash. The mayor fired him a second time, and was upheld by the administrative tribunal and the administrative appeals court. Ms Jubeault later initiated a libel case against Mr Poiteaux, which she dropped.

Last month, after 10 years of legal procedure, the French Council of State issued a mixed ruling, partly in favour of Mr Poiteaux, partly in favour of Courbevoie. The former cop has exhausted every avenue of French justice, and now hopes the European Court of Human Rights will grant him damages. That there is racism among French police comes as no surprise.

A recent landmark decision by the Court of Human Rights found police at Bobigny, another Paris suburb, guilty of torturing an Arab detainee.

Most people in William Poiteaux's situation would have given up long ago. But he has continued stubbornly, from lawyer to lawyer, from tribunal to tribunal, asking for his job and compensation.

One of the Arabs he protected offered him a job in the early 1990s. "But I refused because if I stopped defending my case, everything would have stopped," he says. Now no one will hire him once they learn how he spent the last 10 years. "I don't even know what to do; I have no training. I'm so wound up in bureaucracy, lawyers . . ."

Mr Poiteaux's wife left him, taking their child with her. He cannot sleep without sedatives and lives in a housing project near the Stade de France on 2400 francs (£288) per month.

Because he cannot afford postage, he hand-delivers the photocopies that he gives to journalists in the hope of keeping his case alive.

Mr Poiteaux claims there were two arson attacks on his apartment, and a burglary in which thieves took legal documents. In 1992 he was accused of three armed robberies, jailed for two days and then freed because the supermarket where he worked part-time confirmed his alibi.

The following year he took an overdose of sleeping pills. On Christmas Day 1997 he was arrested and charged with 17 driving offences, manacled and held for three hours. Again, all charges were dropped.

Were these incidents police harassment, or paranoia? "Mental and financial hardship have influenced his personality", his lawyer Yvon Thiant admitted. "Anyone who went through what he did would have a persecution complex, but morally he was right from the beginning."

Mr Thiant compared his client to early trade unionists who were pushed out of their jobs and could never work again. "When a policeman doesn't go along with the others, he's excluded. Rats know each other by their smell. If one smells different, they eat him," he said.

Mr Poiteaux says there was a "clan" of 10 racist cops among the 40 serving in Courbevoie. He has received support from anti-racist groups and from members of the French and European parliaments. A petition signed by mostly north African shopkeepers - names, addresses and signatures included - tells how they were continuously abused and threatened by local police.

His case was always "political", Mr Poiteaux claims. He believes a right-wing politician ordered the police to get the Arabs out of Courbevoie. The town hall, he later learned, wanted to build a housing project on their land. Today the Arab shopkeepers are gone; apartment buildings stand in their former street.

Although he says he still wants to be a cop, William Poiteaux is a broken man. "If I had it to do over, I'd obey orders," he tells me. "If I get another job, I will do everything they ask. I lost 10 years of my life because I did the right thing."