Guardian reporting. Guardian photo essay. Ongoing Guardian coverage. Further Guardian content, stating:
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, asked local authorities to halt all bus and tram traffic from 9pm across the whole of the country. The southern city of Marseille, France’s second-largest, banned all public demonstrations on Friday and said all public transport would stop at 7pm local time. Protests were also banned in Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, Montpellier, Grenoble and Annecy.
The government, which is coming under mounting pressure from rightwing parties to declare a state of emergency, giving authorities extra powers to ban demonstrations and limit free movement, is desperate to avoid a repeat of 2005, when the death of two boys of African origin in a police chase sparked three weeks of rioting.
The foreign ministry rejected as “totally unfounded” accusations by the United Nations of police racism, after a spokesperson for the UN human rights office said “this is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and racial discrimination in law enforcement”.
Unions representing half of French police said on Friday that they were at war with “vermin”. “Today police officers are at the frontline because we are at war,” the Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police unions said in a statement echoing far-right turns of phrase. “Faced with these savage hordes, it’s no longer enough to call for calm, it must be imposed,” they added.
Laurent Escure, the head of the UNSA trade union federation, later disavowed the statement by the police branch of his union, and called for calm and an end to the violence.
The Greens party leader, Marine Tondelier, described the statement as “an appeal for civil war”, adding “can we finally say that we have a structural problem in the police?”
Despite the presence of 40,000 police officers around the country, 249 of whom were injured, the interior ministry said 79 police stations were attacked on Thursday night and 119 other public buildings, including 34 town halls and 28 schools.
Violence flared in Marseille, Lyon, Pau, Toulouse and Lille as well as in parts of Paris, and its suburbs, including the working-class suburb of Nanterre where Nahel was shot dead after failing to comply with a police order to stop.
European news is news, and should be reported in our nation.
From the Guardian photo essay:
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Breitbart reports, this image:
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__________UPDATE__________
Seattle Times carrying an AP feed:
Despite repeated government appeals for calm and stiffer policing, there were even brazen attacks during daylight hours Friday. An Apple store was looted in the eastern city of Strasbourg, where police fired tear gas, and the windows of a fast-food outlet were smashed in a Paris-area shopping mall, where officers also repelled people who sought to break into a shuttered store, authorities said.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin on Friday denounced what he called a night of “rare violence.” His office described the large number of arrests as part of an overall government effort to be “extremely firm” with rioters.
[...]
Deadly use of firearms is less common in France than in the United States, although 13 people who didn’t comply with traffic stops were fatally shot by French police last year. This year, another three people, including Nahel, died under similar circumstances. The deaths have prompted demands for more accountability in France, which also saw racial justice protests after George Floyd’s killing by police in Minnesota.
Race was a taboo topic for decades in France, which is officially committed to a doctrine of colorblind universalism. In the wake of Nahel’s killing, French anti-racism activists renewed complaints about police behavior in general.
The U.N. human rights office said it was concerned by the teen’s killing and the subsequent violence, and urged the swift investigation of allegations of authorities’ disproportionate use of force to quell the unrest.
“This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and racial discrimination in law enforcement,” spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva.
Shamdasani said the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed concern in December about “the frequent use of identity checks, discriminatory stops, the application of criminal fixed fines imposed by the police or law enforcement agencies, that they said disproportionately targets members of certain minority groups.”
A promoted illusion of "color-blind" law enforcement is not helpful when the illusion breaks down with reality stepping into the picture. The awakening can be stronger the more truth has been suppressed and fiction fed to the people.
France will survive as it is, just as policing in the U.S. is settling back after the George Floyd protests, where the over-aggressive police reactions added fuel to the fire. France looks to be seeing the same repressed anger showing through. Met by the same police over-reaction exacerbating the situation.
James Baldwin titled one of his books, "The Fire Next Time."