Greek Police shoot 16-year-old Romani boy, thousands take to the streets
Thousands of people have taken to the Greek streets this week to protest the shooting of a Romani teenager and the recurrent police brutality in the country. Representatives of Greek Roma are criticizing the state for its racism and its apathy.
Greek Roma are also warning that during the last year, several such police interventions have ended in serious injury, Agence-France Presse (AFP) reports. According to police, more than 11,000 people have protested in Athens, Thessaloniki, and other Greek cities.
The BBC and The Guardian reported that protesters have been chanting “Stop this murderous policy!” The unrest broke out after people heard that an officer had fired his gun twice at the 16-year-old Romani boy, wounding him seriously; police were chasing him after he drove away from a gas station in Thessaloniki, allegedly without paying the EUR 20 bill.
According to CCTV footage, the police officers were sitting at the gas station when the Romani teenager allegedly drove off without paying. The officers began pursuing him by motorcycle.
“I fired once into the air and once at the vehicle. The lives of my colleagues were in danger,” a 34-year-old officer involved in the incident said.
On Tuesday, the officer defended himself in court for having used his firearm, allegedly to save his colleagues’ lives. He said that the Romani teenager had attempted to use his car to bring down the motorcycle police.
Parents of the boy say their son is “between life and death”. Doctors removed the bullet from his head.
Immediately after the shooting, about 100 Romani men set up barricades and set garbage cans on fire in front of the hospital where the boy was being treated, and 1,500 demonstrators clashed with police on the streets of Thessaloniki. The protests continued on Tuesday and were attended by the father of the Romani boy who had been shot.
“What, he didn’t pay? Did they have to kill him for that?” the father is quoted by Greek media as saying, adding that if the boy had made a mistake, the police should have arrested him at home.
On social media, video footage has begun to go viral showing police officers intervening against the father of the boy as well. The incident is not the first of its kind in Greece.
Last year an 18-year old Romani man, Nikos Sampanis, was fatally shot by police during a car chase near Athens, and on 6 December 2008 a 15-year-old boy was shot by a police patrol at night in the capital. According to the chair of the Greek Confederation of Roma, Vasilis Pantzos, members of that minority face a racist approach from the state authorities and police brutality in the country.
“This is a tragic incident, the fourth such incident in our community during the past year,” Pantzos told AFP. According to him, Romani people and other vulnerable groups facing hate and prejudice are the most likely to be subjected to police brutality.
The association chair is pointing out that most Romani people in Greece live in poverty and social exclusion. According to the most recent report from the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) on Romani people in selected EU Member States, more than 90 % of Romani people in Greece are at risk of poverty.
More than 40 % of Romani respondents to the FRA survey reported having experienced ill-treatment during the past year because of their ethnicity. The police are trusted by roughly half of Romani people, significantly less than the rest of the Greek population; between 170,000 – 300,000 Romani people are estimated to live in Greece.
