The authorities’ call for calm has been useless. The riots have spread last night throughout France, not only in the periphery of Paris, in reaction to the death, on Tuesday, of a 17-year-old boy by a shot by the police in Nanterre. There are at least 150 detainees.
The strong smell of burning plastic has formed a cloud, this morning, in the satellite neighborhoods of the French capital. Numerous towns have been affected by the indiscriminate burning of vehicles and garbage containers. The incidents have reached suburbs of other cities such as Toulouse, Lille, Nice, Saint-Étienne, Lyon, Dijon or Clermont-Ferrand.
In addition to vehicles, individuals and the police, police stations, city halls, schools, supermarkets, urban buses and a tram have been the object of attack. There has also been looting of shops. There has even been an attempt to attack the Fresnes prison, in the Val-de-Marne, to free detainees. The youth groups that were the protagonists of all these events used, as usual, high-powered fireworks to confront the police and set fires. In Villerbaune, on the outskirts of Lyon, an apartment building that had caught fire had to be evacuated. Several neighbors had to be treated for poisoning.
The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, had announced the preventive deployment, overnight, of 2,000 police officers, but that number has clearly been insufficient to deal with protests so widespread throughout the territory. Macron has convened an inter-ministerial cell at the Élysée, at 8 in the morning, to study the situation. The heads of the Interior, Justice and Ecological Transition have participated, as well as the police prefect of the capital. The Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, has canceled a trip that she had planned to the La Vendée region due to “the tensions of recent days”.
The government spokesman, Olivier Véran, interviewed by the BFM-TV chain, regretted that “symbols of the Republic” such as city halls and schools have been attacked, which will prevent citizens from carrying out administrative procedures and children from going to class. He spoke of “organized” actions. Alluding to Nahel’s death, Véran said that “it is not the Republic that is under arrest, it is a man (the agent involved) who must be tried if he has made a mistake.”
This Thursday, starting at 2 in the afternoon, a demonstration will take place in front of the Nanterre City Hall to express revulsion for the death of Nahel. The young man died from a shot fired by an agent when the boy, who was driving a yellow rental Mercedes, tried to flee from a checkpoint.
The Nanterre drama has reopened the controversy over the effects of a law, approved in 2017, which allows the police to fire at a vehicle that does not respect a checkpoint, whenever the lives of the officers or other people are in danger. The problem is that threat perception is subjective and abuses have occurred.
