Suburban gangs defy French police

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#1 Suburban gangs defy French police

Post by frigidmagi »

BBC
Police responsible for law enforcement in France's tense immigrant-majority housing estates liken their job to a military mission.

"What we have is urban warfare," according to Patrick Trotignon, a 30-year veteran working for the police union Synergie.

Gaelle James, an officer who works in Montreuil, a poor suburb just east of Paris, agrees.

"We are confronted by ever more criminals who are getting ever more violent," she says.

"They are now out to kill cops."

This may sound like hyperbole - but a year after a wave of rioting spread through France's ghettos, a number of attacks in recent weeks seem to confirm this grim assessment.

On 13 October, for instance, police responding to an emergency call in Epinay-sur-Seine, north of Paris, drove into a trap - two cars blocked their vehicle, which was set upon by dozens of youths wielding iron bars and knives.

The officers fought their way out without firing their guns, but one ended up in hospital with a broken jaw.

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Ms James says this kind of attack is becoming worryingly frequent - washing machines have even been dropped from tower blocks on official vehicles.

"Doctors and other emergency services no longer venture into some estates," she notes.

The increasingly organised nature of violence is highlighted in a recent report by the interior ministry's intelligence service.

A future wave of suburban disturbances, it warns darkly, could target "the last remaining institutional representatives in a number of areas - the police".

Filming attacks

According to Mr Trotignon, the attacks are the work of teams structured along military lines.

"Operations are planned by senior commanders, with underlings making emergency calls and the foot soldiers carrying out the assaults," he says.


Gaele James
What's the point of taking risks to catch criminals when they can just walk out of court?
Gaelle James
Police lieutenant

"And the icing on the cake is filming the whole thing with your mobile phone."

The violence in French suburbs has devastating consequences on police morale. "Those posted there can't leave fast enough," Mr Trotignon says.

The impoverished area of Seine-Saint-Denis north-east of Paris - where the 2005 riots began - is "haemorrhaging" officers, he adds, as those with enough seniority get transferred to the provinces.

This high turnover means that those tasked with France's most dangerous districts tend to be young - as the prefect, the top official in Seine-Saint-Denis, noted in a leaked note to the interior ministry.

The prefect and many in the police blame this situation on soft judges reluctant to jail the young offenders.

After last year's disturbances, the prefect wrote, only one minor in Seine-Saint-Denis was imprisoned out of 85 prosecuted.

"What's the point of taking risks to catch criminals when they can just walk out of court?" Ms James complains.

'Wildlife park'

According to Mr Trotignon, the head of the Seine-Saint-Denis tribunal is nicknamed "Father Christmas" by delinquents.

But few in the suburbs feel they are getting fair - let alone preferential - treatment from the authorities.

Contempt for police, in particular, is almost universal among young men. Here is a sample of quotes from youths recently interviewed in housing estates near Paris:

* "We don't want a police station here. Some cops are racist."

* "Riots are caused by police. They think we are all delinquents."

* "The cops don't respect us. They come in and smash doors. They systematically suspect blacks and Arabs."

* "Some cops are aggressive and use racial slurs when they check you."

Older residents, of course, express different views. They deeply resent the rampant lawlessness and want more, not fewer, police.


Youths from the French suburbs say they think all the ingredients for chaos remain

In pictures

"Cars are vandalised and youths fight all the time, but when we call the cops they never come," complains a North African man living in Clichy-sous-Bois, a dismal ghetto north-east of Paris.

Nadir Dendoune, a 34-year-old journalist living in l'Ile-Saint-Denis, says what is needed above all is better policing.

"When I was young, the cops were patrolling on mopeds and talked to us," he recalls.

"Now they don't know us. They just patrol the area locked in their cars and look around as if they were in a wildlife park."

Beatings

In 2002 Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy decided to abandon community policing based on prevention in favour of a strict law-and-order approach.

Beat officers were replaced by shock "anti-crime brigades" who police the suburbs mostly from outside. Many local officials and youth workers in the suburbs feel this was a dreadful mistake.


2005 UNREST IN FIGURES
Rioting in Toulouse in November 2005
9193 cars burnt
2,921 arrests
21 nights of riots
Source: French police

"In this area community-based policing played a very positive role. Officers did real work in the estates," says Clichy's deputy mayor, Olivier Klein.

"Now they go in only for tough security missions, but this does not make people more secure."

Laurence Ribeaucourt, a social worker in the Clichy area, says the riots reveal a growing divide between police and people.

"For the past three years things have been getting steadily worse," she says. "Youths tell me they have been beaten up in custody and harassed by police."

Whether France's housing estates need soft "prevention" or tough repression is a matter of debate.

What is beyond dispute, however, is that the law is no longer enforced in many of France's deprived suburbs.

Relations between large sections of the population and the police have broken down.

Both sides are afraid of each other and as long as the climate of fear prevails, the urban warfare will continue.
You know, when gangs of kids attack cops with guns with knives and iron bars, I wouldn't say they're afraid of the police. Just saying.

Other links from the BBC are
Police deployed in Paris suburbs
Creches suffer in French riots
Youths torch two buses near Paris

This is gonna get uglier and this is gonna spread at this rate.
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#2

Post by Destructionator XV »

What actually amazes me is the French police seem to just be taking it. Of all these stories I have read, the police have never used their guns. The sad part is if they do defend themselves with potentially lethal force, it will probably just make things worse, but at some point, they are going to have to do a heck of a lot more than they are doing now to put a stop to this.

If these gangs think they police are giving them a hard time now, what will they think when their actions cross the line?
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#3

Post by frigidmagi »

I have to disargee that using their guns will make things worse. As it stands alot of these kids think they can get away with anything. That has to change, that means the French police should start showing that there are real and unavoidable conquences for attacking cops. Cops open fire and you die.

Right now there is no reason for the gangs not to ramp up the violence, they have yet to met anything or anyone that would stop them.
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#4

Post by Destructionator XV »

I usually think the same thing, but my concern is they will use it as an excuse to escalate the violence even more, maybe bringing in greater numbers who will then buy into the nonsense that the police are out to get them.

You and I can easily realize they would be wrong about that looking in from the outside, but it might be enough to get fence sitters who are already biased against the authorities to see it differently.

But then again, like you said, when you are being bullied, letting the bullies push you around just encourages them to keep doing it.

At this point, what I feel should be done is use the necessary force to put them in prison for a few years. Try to avoid bloodshed if realistically possible, but definitely take action to show them that something will be done if this continues. "After last year's disturbances, the prefect wrote, only one minor in Seine-Saint-Denis was imprisoned out of 85 prosecuted. " is what really bothers me about this, and that should be the first thing they fix IMO.
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#5

Post by frigidmagi »

I have to tell you that the violence is going to increase if the response remains as is. At the moment this makes them feel powerful, in charge, effective and when they get away with this and put police in the hospital and force the French government to withdraw from their homes, they see the government as weak, ineffective and unwilling to confront them. Therefore they will continue to push.

These views are not nescessarly the truth of the matter, but in preception counts for more in these events.

Think about this. First they rioted, now they are purposefully ambushing policemen and denying government officals access to their neighborhoods and meeting very little effective resistence. We are luckly in that they are poorly organized. There are no "Revolutionary Committees" no terrorist masterminds hiding in the shadows directing this. But at the same time this robs us of a central target that we can hit back.

While to be blunt I feel that their complaints are valid in that they are denied chances in education and employment, these actions cannot be allowed.
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#6

Post by Hotfoot »

You know what would happen if every disenfranchised youth in the inner cities of America started killing police officers and rioting? Aside from parallels to the Rodney King riots, you'd have full scale retaliation of the Police. In the US, killing a cop is a smack to the face of police officers, and they will hunt you down and make sure you resist arrest. If you pull a gun on a cop or rush them with a knife, they will shoot you to save their own lives.

And if a riot breaks out, well there are specially trained riot squads with tear gas, bean bags, rubber bullets, stun guns, and a growing list of less than lethal options, but when push comes to shove, killers shouldn't be treated with kids gloves. There are other, legitimate ways to protest unfair conditions that don't involve killing people.

Yes, conditions in France suck for them, it's true. However, by singling out police officers for murder they've lost whatever sympathy they might have gained. I mean, if they were tagging the officers or pelting them with eggs or something to make a point by harassing them, okay, I'd be fine with that, but taking another human life because yours isn't as nice as it could have been? That's bullshit. Using that logic, I could kill anyone who has a chance at a better life than me because they had more money growing up.

Frigid's right. Doing nothing only tells these fuckers that they can keep killing with no reponse. You do want to be careful only to target the guilty parties though - clamping down on the whole community will only end one way: poorly.
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#7

Post by Masterharper »

Escalation go!

Of course, this seems to have been going on so long, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the country that has been practicing these things since they've been around (that is to say: Revolutions.) may be going through a bit of a societal upheaval. Maybe a problem just got out of hand, but, wrong as I may be, I predict that France may see a 'revolution' of sorts through this.

Which should be pretty interesting, seeing as how they're a modernized, industrial nation, and I can't recall off the top of my head, how many bloody revolutions have occurred in modern countries in this era of technology.
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#8

Post by Rogue 9 »

In any other country, I'd say it couldn't happen; untrained and disarmed citizens cannot defeat a modern military. However, as we're talking about France, where responding to deadly force is evidently a no-no even for the authorities, it just might. :roll:
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