Rioting has spread across France like a summer wildfire in the wake of Tuesday’s killing of 17-year-old Arab boy Nahel M at a police traffic stop in the Paris banlieue of Nanterre. Social media video has contradicted suggestions by the police that they were under threat.
Overnight on Wednesday protesters launched fireworks at police, set cars on fire and torched public buildings in the suburbs around Paris, in Toulouse, Amiens, Dijon, St-Etienne, and outside Lyon and Lille. A local court in Asnières was set ablaze while a prison in Fresnes, south of Paris, was attacked with fireworks. Police reported 180 arrests and were deploying 40,000 officers across the country on Thursday night in anticipation of further expected trouble.
The public rage at the killing, described by President Emmanuel Macron as “unexplainable and inexcusable”, has focused on the 2017 loosening of police rules of engagement which has seen a steady rise in what in the US has been called “death-by-cop”. There it led to the exponential growth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Nahel was the second person this year in France to have been killed in a police shooting during a traffic stop – 13 died last year in such circumstances, up from seven in 2021. Some, because police shot them, others because of incidents as they fled, but Reuters reports that a majority of victims of lethal police shootings during traffic stops since 2017 were black or Arab.
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The mix of police indiscipline and racial prejudice have long made the banlieues a tinder box . In 2005 two young boys were shot dead running from the police in an electricity substation outside Paris, triggering weeks of unrest and the declaration of a state of national emergency. More than 9,000 vehicles and dozens of public buildings and businesses were set on fire.
The officer who fired the fatal shot in Nanterre has been held under formal investigation for “voluntary homicide”. But only radical and immediate reform of the police is likely to calm France’s banlieues this time.