Why police violence proves a stubborn problem for democratic Tunisia

Abdallah Raddadi says he didn’t know what hit him.

The 30-year-old was walking down the street in his working-class Tunis neighborhood of Sidi Hassine when everything went black. He woke up in the hospital four days later.

But he says he is certain who hit him.

“The police,” says Mr. Raddadi, whose family obtained video footage of the attack.

“Policemen are hostile to young men and they are now beating us in public,” he says. “We thought we would prosper with the revolution, but the police state never changed.”

Mr. Raddadi’s beating is one episode in a summer of discontent in Tunisia. As it navigates the COVID-19 pandemic, the young democracy in North Africa is having a public reckoning with a feature of its past and present: police violence

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