Overnight, There Are Fewer Arrests And Fewer Street Fights In France
Less than 160 people were detained during the course of the night in connection with the riots that have rocked cities throughout France since a teenager of North African heritage was killed by a police officer, according to the interior ministry on Monday.
Just months after widespread protests against an unpopular pension reform and one year out from hosting the Olympics, the government of Emmanuel Macron found some solace in the relative calm that followed five nights of intense rioting.
157 people were reportedly detained overnight, down from over 700 the night before and over 1,300 on Friday, according to the interior ministry.
According to the ministry, three of the 45,000 police personnel deployed overnight sustained injuries. According to preliminary estimates, 350 buildings and 300 cars also sustained damage.
The grandmother of Nahel, the boy who was killed by police during a traffic stop in a suburb of Paris, expressed on Sunday her desire for the riots that his death had brought about to come to an end.
In the low-income, ethnically diverse suburbs that around major French cities, as well as among rights organisations, his killing has fanned long-standing charges of discrimination, police aggression, and systematic racism among law enforcement agencies. These complaints have been refuted by authorities.
The home of Vincent Jeanbrun, the mayor of the Paris suburb of l’Hay-les-Roses, was attacked on Saturday while his wife and children were inside sleeping. Since he was shot on Tuesday, protesters have set cars on fire, looted stores, and destroyed town halls and other properties.
On Monday, Jeanbrun told BFM TV, “This is a real nightmare.” “There has been a state of siege over us.”
Conservative Les Republicains party member Jeanbrun expressed regret in the interview for the government’s decision not to declare a state of emergency, which he claimed would have allowed municipal police to better protect the town and its town hall, at which the rioters also attacked last week.
“I myself grew up in these big housing blocks in L’Hay-des-Roses,” he remarked. We were modest and didn’t have much, but we wanted to overcome it and believed that hard effort would help us succeed.
At this point, everything points to youngsters from the same suburb as the guys who attacked his home, he continued.
