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"Pose Ton CRS" (English: "Put Your CRS") is a photoshop meme based on an exploitable photograph of a French riot police officer kicking a female bystander during a demonstration against the French government's labor code reform in April 2016. After the video footage of the incident surfaced on Twitter, the image of the police officer quickly became a subject of photoshopped parodies in the French social media, in a similar vein to the Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop that rose to online notoriety during the Occupy protests at Univeristy of California's Davis campus in November 2011.

Origin

On April 14th, 2016, the French riot police force Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS) clashed against hundreds of angry demonstrators in Paris during a violent street protest against the French government's proposed labor code reform. As the riot police officers of the CRS began advancing towards the crowd to disperse the demonstration, which included use of canned tear gas, a female customer at a nearby café approached the police force and confronted them for using excessive force. The woman's verbal protest was promptly cut short by a violent kick from one of the riot police officers; the incident was filmed on camera by a BMFTV camera crew and the footage was uploaded to YouTube (shown below).

[This video has been removed]

In addition to the video footage, the precise moment at which the riot police officer raised one of his legs was also captured on camera by French freelance photojournalist Jan Schmidt-Whitley, who promptly uploaded the image to his Facebook page[1], along with a backstory describing the circumstances leading up to the incident (shown below). Schmidt-Whitley's Facebook photograph was shared over 3,000 times in the following 72 hours.

Spread

The same day the photograph was uploaded online, Twitter user @JulesLmeghribi[2] submitted a cutout template of the riot police officer (shown below), which soon gave way to dozens of photoshopped parodies featuring the exploitable image on the microblogging site under the hashtag #PoseTonCRS,[3] which roughly translates to "Put Your CRS" and doubles as a wordplay on the balletic technical term Posé, "a movement in which the dancer steps, in any desired position, from one foot to the other with a straight knee onto the flat foot." By the next morning, the trend had been widely reported on by various French news outlets, including 20 Minutes[4], Le Monde[5] or Les Inrocks,[6] among others.

Victim's Testimony

On April 15th, the woman that was kicked to the ground by the CRS officer was identified as Tamara, a 24-years-old college student, who said she was sitting at the terrace of a nearby café before getting caught in the crossfire between demonstrators and riot police, according to an interview[8] with BuzzFeed. She also revealed that she intends to file a complaint against the police:

Original:

«J’étais au café Le Conservatoire, avenue Jaurès. Les lycéens avaient fini par charger après avoir été bloqués pendant 40 minutes par les CRS. Forcément, les policiers ont chargé en retour et toutes les personnes qui se trouvaient en terrasse et d’autres personnes pas du tout impliquées dans la manif, se sont retrouvées au milieu de tout ça.
Ils ont lancé leurs lacrymogènes sans réfléchir sur les personnes en terrasse vu que les lycéens ont vite reculé. Alors j’ai “gueulé” sur eux en disant aux CRS qu’ils s’en prenaient à n’importe qui, sans réfléchir. Là, je me me suis pris un coup violent et non justifié, je suis encore choquée.»

Translation:

"I was sitting at café Le Conservatoire, in Jaurès avenue. The high school students eventually charged the riot control force because they had blocked them for a whole 40 minutes. Of course, the policemen charged as well in retaliation but everyone who happened to be seated at the terraces of the cafés as well as other bystanders who weren't involved at all in the demonstration became trapped in the middle of all this mess. The policemen threw tear gas at us, the people in terrace, without thinking, as the students quickly backed off. So I "shouted" at them, saying that the police was attacking anyone at random without thinking. That's when I got gratuitously and violently kicked. I'm still in shock."

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