“What structures the activist field in Belgium is primarily the work of victims’ families”: interview with Retrace

On May 9, 2017, Ouassim Toumi, 24, and Sabrina El Bakkali, 20, died during a police chase in Brussels, when their motorcycle collided with a police car positioned as a roadblock at the exit of a tunnel in the city center. Six years later, in December 2023, the three police officers involved in the deadly chase were sentenced to prison — a rare exception in the Belgian justice system.

A few days before the opening of the trial in November 2023, the Belgian research group Retrace published a video investigation, in partnership with Le Soir, which reconstructed the events using 3D modelling. INDEX, which has been following the production of this investigation remotely, spoke to the members of Retrace, who gave their views from Belgium and France on the issue of police violence and the approach of an independent counter-inquiry.

INDEX: Can you start by introducing yourself?

Arnaud Mewis: Retrace Investigations is an independent research and counter-investigation group on state violence. The group is currently made up of Rémy Farge, a human rights researcher specialising in police and justice issues, Léo Guillaume, a video artist, and myself, who is an architect and 3D modeler. We have been active since 2022, and are based in Belgium.

Rémy Farge: At the moment, we see Retrace more as a research group than as a group of experts or a militant group. We’re not experts in the sense that, for this case, we didn’t want to produce an expert report with judicial value. At the same time, our approach differs from that of activists such as the victims’ families’ collectives or their support groups – even though we consider, for example, that the Toumi and El Bakkali families have themselves carried out genuine counter-investigative work on the case of Ouassim and Sabrina’s deaths since 2017, which must be recognised.

INDEX: How did you come to work on this particular case? Was the case of Sabrina and Ouassim particularly known in Belgium?

Léo Guillaume: There have been many cases of deaths during police chases in Belgium, both before and after Sabrina and Ouassim’s case. Just like in France, these are incidents that raise important questions and highlight longstanding problems within police operations. Some of these cases have received more media attention than others, such as Adil Charrot’s case [who died in Anderlecht in 2020] or Mawda Shawri’s [a two-year-old girl fatally shot in the head during a police chase on a Belgian highway on May 17, 2018]. Personally, I hadn’t heard about Sabrina and Ouassim’s case at the time it happened; there were very few articles, just a few brief mentions in the crime news sections in the days following the incident. It was a rather underreported case, and that’s partly why we took an interest in it, with the intention of producing an investigation that would help to better understand exactly what happened.

RF: As mentioned earlier, it’s important to note that from the very beginning, the victims’ two families did an enormous amount of work to raise awareness about the case, through public demonstrations, regular gatherings… So, there was a gap between what was known within activist circles on the one hand, and on the other, the media attention given to the case, which did not reflect or translate the in-depth work carried out by the families.

INDEX: Over the past decade, through emblematic cases such as the death of Adama Traoré, the issue of police brutality has gained significant prominence in the French media landscape and thus in public debate. Is this also the case in Belgium?

RF: I think we observe the same in Belgium — the topic is progressing, but often through international news. It’s a somewhat bitter observation because people talk much more about George Floyd’s murder than, for example, Lamine Bangoura’s case [who died on May 7, 2018, in Roeselare, West Flanders], who was killed under comparable circumstances in many respects: he was a Black man, killed by a police officer who stepped on him, his death was filmed, but the video had nowhere near the same impact. The case ended with a dismissal, with relatively little media coverage compared to the gravity of the case and what it reveals about racism and judicial impunity.

That said, I believe what really structured the activist field around these issues is the work done by victims’ families, which goes beyond mere visibility and has an organizational effect, helping to make police violence a matter of general public interest, the consequences of which are seen in many media outlets.

INDEX: In France, it can be noted that the increased media coverage of police brutality also results from the hardening of law enforcement practices, notably during the repression of the Yellow Vests movement. For the first time, police weapons were used massively against white people, whereas in previous decades, the targets were generally racialized persons living in working-class neighborhoods with post-colonial immigrant backgrounds — and this violence received only marginal media coverage. What about Belgium?

RF: There are some differences between France and Belgium, particularly in police weaponry. For example, in Belgium, LBDs [commonly known as flashballs] do not exist. Belgian police sometimes use flashballs — the Belgian model being the FN 303 — but these are primarily used against racialized bodies, in working-class neighborhoods, or against members of undocumented migrant collectives, etc. Regarding law enforcement, other forms of violence are common to both France and Belgium, such as kettling, arbitrary arrests, and violence in police stations. There too, however, there is differentiated treatment depending on whether the person is racialized or not. During the “Contre la justice de classe et de race” demonstration on January 24, 2021, in Brussels, there were many arrests and much violence against those detained that day. Both the arrests and physical violence were, according to testimonies, largely discriminatory: the people most targeted were non-white.

INDEX: Let’s return to the case of Sabrina and Ouassim. How did you organize your work? Because it was precisely through this counter-investigation that the Retrace collective was formed, right?

AM: Considerable counter-investigation work had already been done by the families and their lawyers during the inquiry. The structuring of our team largely relied on this prior work. Since we already had the video format in mind in order to produce a counter-investigation for the public, that also guided our work, which was both investigative and involved writing and synthesis. It’s also an essentially collective effort that calls on different skills — hence the composition of our team, including 3D reconstruction, writing, and video production.

LG: I think we quickly agreed on the necessity to conduct a counter-investigation. We met you during the INDEX conference at the Faculty of Architecture of the Université Libre de Bruxelles [in March 2022]. The discussions that followed helped us organize ourselves, notably regarding the choice of technical tools and how to optimize collective work processes.

Meeting journalist Arthur Sente and partnering with Le Soir were also important steps: it was a new stage that tested our model, research, and way of analyzing and synthesizing the judicial file. It also led us to think about how to share the investigation with the general public. Ultimately, it took a long time — producing this counter-investigation took us over a year.

RF: We were inspired by existing groups, especially Forensic Architecture and, by extension, INDEX as well. I think we share at least two approaches. On one hand, the idea of examining a very specific case to question a broader topic — here, Belgian police practices, notably police chases. On the other, transparency and knowledge sharing: ensuring every step of the analysis or investigation is clearly exposed, verifiable, even reproducible. In an iterative process, the fact that we regularly sought feedback on the investigation during production — whether from INDEX, Arthur Sente, or outside experts — fits this spirit of exchange, which we see as central to the research process.

INDEX: Your counter-investigation was published three days before the trial opened, in November 2023. Was it submitted as part of the legal case? Did it have any judicial impact?

RF: No, it was not submitted. That wasn’t one of our main goals. For us, the primary purpose of the counter-investigation was to inform the public so people could evaluate the justice system’s work in light of the facts we made public and presented in detail through a reconstruction.

LG: The judicial file in this case, as is often true in police violence cases, is complex and technical. For us, it was essential to report its content succinctly for the public — to help raise awareness and bring the case into public debate. There’s no video documentation, so the challenge was to make the facts visible and understandable.

RF: In some cases, the abundance of images can motivate making a 3D reconstruction to cross-reference footage. In others, like this one, 3D is justified by the need to compensate for the lack of images. This is also an approach used by INDEX and Forensic Architecture. Our goal was to make the facts more tangible: through a reconstruction using satellite images to better situate the urban environment risks created by the police chase, and to show how the vehicle involved in the collision obstructed the motorcycle, contrary to regulations.

INDEX: On December 5, 2023, the three officers involved in Sabrina and Ouassim’s death were sentenced at first instance to prison terms ranging from 5 to 10 months. Were you surprised by this verdict? Are there precedents in Belgium where police officers in service were sentenced to prison?

RF: This conviction is an exception. We mentioned earlier the Mawda case, which involved extremely serious facts and is well documented. The officer who fired the shot that killed the child was sentenced to one year’s suspended prison, then the sentence was reduced on appeal to ten months suspended. It is very rare that police officers are given actual prison time — even though the sentences in the Sabrina and Ouassim case are too short for the inspectors to serve time. It should also be noted that the officers appealed and the trial will be held again in September. Moreover, to our knowledge, they have not been suspended; so, for now, they are presumably still working.

INDEX: What were the reactions to this verdict, for example within the police hierarchy or the police unions?

RF: After the verdict, there were several reactions from the police institution. A demonstration was organized by police officers in front of the Brussels courthouse, and there was a press release from the chief of the Brussels-Ixelles police zone. In that statement, the chief reaffirmed his “confidence” and “support” for his officers. The press interviewed many police officers in the following days; I recall one officer describing the judgment as a “Damocles’ sword” that would prevent any police operation. Additionally, a police union directly attacked our work on social media. The police institution therefore positioned itself in direct opposition to the court decision. Their reaction was entirely defensive and thus very problematic.

AM: It is obvious the verdict did not lead to a questioning of police chase practices in Belgium. The police institution remains in denial about any structural problems with its practices.

INDEX: Have there been cases of police chases similar to that of Sabrina and Ouassim since their deaths?

RF: At the end of our investigation, to address the issue of police chases, we specifically cited other cases of deaths in chases. Most are after 2017 and therefore after Sabrina and Ouassim’s deaths. In this list are Adil Charrot’s death in 2020 and Mehdi Bouda’s in 2019. In both cases, the chamber of counsel — the Belgian court that decides whether or not to bring charges — recently issued a dismissal order, meaning no prosecution of the officers. Appeals will be made against these decisions, but it’s clear that the two most recent police chase cases to be judged have resulted in dismissals. So far, they have not been publicly debated in a trial setting.

[Interview by INDEX on 27 May 2024].

To find out more and follow the activities of the Retrace collective, visit their website.