France is bracing for another eruption of urban rioting on Thursday night following the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old boy by police.
Tens of thousands of police officers have been deployed to the streets to contain possible violence. Commuters were seen 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 honour 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.”
Heavy deployment
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, adding: “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 as a precaution to safeguard transportation workers and passengers, a decision sure to impact thousands of travellers in the French capital and its suburbs.
“Our transports are not targets for thugs and vandals!” Valerie Pecresse, head of the Paris region, tweeted.
Overnight curfew
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 9pm until 6 am through to Monday.
It cited “the risk of new public order disturbances” for the decision, after two nights of urban unrest.
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 neighbourhoods that have welcomed generations of immigrants from France’s former colonies and elsewhere.
Anti-racism activists renewed their complaints about police behaviour in the shooting’s wake.
