Cop

The story of a French journalist who infiltrated the country’s police force to reveal a culture of racism and violence in which officers act with impunity.

What happens behind the walls of a police station? In order to answer this question, undercover journalist Valentin Gendrot put his life on hold for two years. He decided to undertake training and become a police officer. Several months later, Gendrot was working in a police station in one of Paris’s tough northern arrondissements, where relations between the law and locals are strained.

Valentin Gendrot hides nothing. He recounts the precarious working conditions, the suicide of a colleague, the racist remarks made by state agents, the blunders, the cover-ups, and the violence directed towards young black, Arab, and migrant men — ‘the bastards’, as the cops call them.

In Cop, Gendrot opens a door no one outside the police force has stepped through before.