France braces for more violence after police shooting
NANTERRE, FRANCE — France braced for another eruption of urban rioting Thursday night after the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old, with tens of thousands of officers hitting the streets and commuters rushing home before transport services closed down early for safety reasons.
Despite government appeals for calm and vows that order would be restored, smoke from cars and garbage set ablaze was already billowing over the streets of the Paris suburb of Nanterre following a peaceful afternoon march in honor of the teen identified only by his first name, Nahel.
The police officer accused of pulling the trigger was handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide after prosecutor Pascal Prache said his initial investigation led him to conclude “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met.”
After a morning crisis meeting following violence that injured scores of police and damaged nearly 100 public buildings, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the number of police officers would more than quadruple, from 9,000 to 40,000. In the Paris region alone, the number of officers deployed would more than double to 5,000.
“The professionals of disorder must go home,” Darmanin said. While there’s no need yet to declare a state of emergency — a measure taken to quell weeks of rioting in 2005 — he added: “The state’s response will be extremely firm.” He said officers had made more than 180 arrests before Thursday and that there would “doubtless” be more.
Bus and tram services in the Paris area were shutting down before sunset to as a precaution to safeguard transportation workers and passengers, a decision sure to impact thousands of travelers in the French capital and its suburbs.
“Our transports are not targets for thugs and vandals!” Valerie Pecresse, head of the Paris region tweeted.
The town of Clamart, home to 54,000 people in the French capital’s southwest suburbs, said it was taking the extraordinary step of putting an overnight curfew in place from 9 p.m. until 6 a.m. through to Monday.
It cited “the risk of new public order disturbances” for the decision, after two nights of urban unrest. “Clamart is a safe and calm town, we are determined that it stay that way,” it said. The mayor of another Paris region town, Neuilly-sur-marne in the eastern suburbs, also announced a nighttime curfew covering three parts of his town of 37,000 inhabitants, also until Monday morning.
The shooting captured on video shocked the country and stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people in housing projects and other disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The teenager’s family and their lawyers haven’t said the police shooting was race-related and they didn’t release his surname or details about him.
Still, his death instantly inflamed raw nerves in neighborhoods that have welcomed generations of immigrants from France’s former colonies and elsewhere. Their France-born children frequently complain that they are subjected to police ID checks and harassment far more frequently than white people or those in more affluent neighborhoods.
Prache, the Nanterre prosecutor, said officers tried to stop Nahel because he looked so young and was driving a Mercedes with Polish license plates in a bus lane.
He ran a red light to avoid being stopped then got stuck in traffic. Both officers involved said they drew their guns to prevent him from fleeing.
The officer who fired a single shot said he feared he and his colleague or someone else could be hit by the car, according to Prache. The officers said they felt “threatened” as the car drove off.