Tensions on France's streets ease, fewer arrests overnight
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[July 03, 2023]
By Tassilo Hummel
PARIS (Reuters) -Fewer than 160 people were arrested overnight in
connection to riots that have rocked cities across France following the
killing of a teenager of North African descent by a police officer, the
interior ministry said on Monday.
The relative calm following five nights of heavy riots offered some
relief to the government of Emmanuel Macron in its fight to regain
control of the situation, just months after widespread protests over an
unpopular pension reform and a year out from hosting the Olympics.
The death of Nahel, a 17-year-old with Algerian and Moroccan parents,
has stoked longstanding complaints of discrimination, police violence
and systemic racism among law enforcement - denied by authorities - from
rights groups and within the low-income, racially mixed suburbs that
ring major French cities.
Since he was shot on Tuesday, rioters have torched cars, looted stores
and targeted town halls and other properties, with flashpoints in cities
including Paris, Strasbourg in the east and Marseille and Nice in the
south.
The Interior Ministry has poured up to 45,000 police onto the streets
each night to quell the unrest, which has mostly been confined to the
suburbs but occasionally erupted into clashes in tourist areas such as
Paris' Champs-Elysees avenue.
The ministry said 157 people were arrested overnight, down from over 700
arrests the night before and over 1,300 on Friday night.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2023/Jul/03/images/ads/current/graue_lda_preowned_062623.jpg)
Three police officers were injured, the ministry said, while 300
vehicles were damaged by fire, according to provisional figures.
The grandmother of Nahel, who was shot by police during a traffic stop
in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, said on Sunday the rioters were using
his death as an excuse to cause havoc and said the family wanted calm.
"I tell them to stop it. It's mothers who take buses, it's mothers who
walk outside. We should calm things, we don't want them to break
things," the woman identified on BFM TV as Nadia said. "Nahel is dead,
that's all there is."
MEETING MAYORS
The riots amount to the worst crisis for Macron since the "Yellow Vest"
protests over fuel prices gripped much of France in late 2018.
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![](../images/070323PIX/news_n8.jpg)
Flowers are seen at Nelson Mandela
Square, where Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager was killed by a French
police officer during a traffic stop, in Nanterre, France, July 2,
2023. The placards read "How Many Nahel have not been filmed ?" and
"Justice and Truth for Nahel". REUTERS/Nacho Doce
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2023/Jul/03/images/ads/current/businessdirectory_dailycover_2023.png)
In mid-April, Macron gave himself 100 days to bring reconciliation
and unity to a divided country after rolling strikes and
sometimes-violent protests over his raising of the retirement age,
which he had promised in his election campaign.
Macron postponed a state visit to Germany to deal with the crisis
and had to leave an EU summit early. He is due to meet the leaders
of parliament on Monday and more than 220 mayors of towns and cities
that have been affected by riots on Tuesday.
Vincent Jeanbrun, the mayor of the Paris suburb of L'Hay-les-Roses,
whose home was attacked while his wife and children were asleep
inside on Saturday, on Monday described the situation as "a real
nightmare".
"We have been going through a state of siege", Jeanbrun, a member of
the centre-right Les Republicains party, told BFM TV on Monday.
"I have myself grown up in L'Hay-les-Roses in these large housing
blocks", he said. "We were modest, we didn't have much, but we
wanted to overcome it, we had hope that we would make it with hard
work."
In Nanterre, in the west of Paris, flowers and other tributes mark
the spot where Nahel was shot almost a week ago. Graffiti calls for
revenge and criticises the police.
And while tensions were still high, some residents said the material
damage to vehicle and businesses should stop.
Forty-nine-year-old Josie Oranger said people who worked hard or
borrowed to buy themselves a car or set up a business were being
disadvantaged.
"All it takes is one night of trouble, and they've lost everything.
It’s not their fault, everything that happened.”
The police officer involved has acknowledged firing a lethal shot,
the state prosecutor says, telling investigators he wanted to
prevent a dangerous police chase. His lawyer Laurent-Franck Lienard
has said he did not intend to kill the teenager.
(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Alison
Williams)
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