Three nights of unrest in the French capital’s northern suburbs have stoked fears of a major flare-up in deprived neighborhoods where weeks of lockdown have exacerbated the simmering tensions between restless youths and police.
Six weeks into France’s nationwide lockdown, Zouhair Ech-Chetouani is an increasingly worried man. In more than 20 years of social work, the community leader says the restive northern suburbs of Paris have never felt quite so tense.
According to Ech-Chetouani, the strict confinement rules to halt the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, coupled with tough policing enforcing those rules, have mixed up an “explosive cocktail” in areas already blighted by poverty, unemployment and now a worsening health crisis.
“The spark has been lit,” he says, referring to the unrest that has swept through several northern suburbs of Paris in recent nights.
The trouble in Villeneuve-La-Garenne first flared late on Saturday after a motorcyclist collided with the open door of an unmarked police car during a pursuit. Witnesses said the officers had deliberately opened the door into the motorcyclist’s path, a claim denied by police.
The skirmishes lasted into the early hours of Sunday before calm was restored but unrest broke out again the following two nights, spreading to other suburbs north of Paris. Police said fireworks were aimed at them and several cars were torched while officers fired tear gas to disperse the troublemakers.
A history of violence
Relations between police and residents have long been a fraught issue in France’s economically poor and ethnically diverse suburbs, where men of African and North African origin complain about being routinely stopped and searched simply because of the colour of their skin.
A study by France’s National Centre for Scientific Research has shown that blacks are 11.5 times more likely to be checked by police than whites, and those of Arab origin are seven times more likely.
>> Racism, sex abuse and impunity: French police’s toxic legacy in the suburbs
In what has become a depressing cycle of violence and resentment, such routine checks can lead to violent altercations and eventually riots, a daunting prospect the French government is desperate to avoid as it grapples with a health emergency.
When President Emmanuel Macron imposed a nationwide lockdown starting March 17, police officers privately expressed concerns that tough restrictions on public life could amplify tensions and spark unrest.
In late March, the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé, a leading source of investigative journalism, reported that the Interior Ministry had quietly asked police chiefs to adopt a light touch as they seek to enforce the lockdown in restive suburbs so as not to inflame tensions.
However, activists on the ground say the police approach has been anything but light.
Disproportionate force
On the first day of confinement, the Seine-Saint-Denis department northeast of Paris – home to France’s poorest districts – accounted for 10 percent of all fines handed out for breaching the lockdown despite comprising just over 2 percent of the country’s population.
Since then, videos of heavy-handed arrests have circulated widely on French social media, along with calls for revenge.
“You’re much less likely to see police fining and harassing parents who play with their children in the Bois de Boulogne,” says Echi-Chetouani, referring to the park that borders the 16th arrondissement (district) of Paris in the French capital’s affluent west.
The social worker says the situation has considerably worsened since the start of the lockdown, which he argues has only heightened a sense of power and impunity among the police.
“When there are people out in the streets, police abuses are less likely to go unnoticed,” he explains. “But with residents locked up at home, the police have become more violent and arbitrary.”
He adds: “Of course, most officers do their work conscientiously. But it only takes a few bad apples eager to settle scores for things to get out of hand very fast.”
In late March, a coalition of rights groups including Human Rights Watch released a statement denouncing the police’s “unacceptable”, “illegal” and “sometimes dangerous” practices.
“The current state of sanitary emergency should not be in breach of the rule of law and does not justify discriminatory checks or unjustified and disproportionate force,” the statement read.
Police unions, which did not return FRANCE 24’s requests for comment, have rejected the accusations, noting that officers are constantly targeted and provoked by youths in tense suburbs.
‘All we got was an order to stay home’
Critics of police tactics say they reflect a wider failure to take into account the specificities of the impoverished and densely populated suburbs as they grapple with the twin challenges of a health emergency and home confinement.
While Seine-Saint-Denis was hit by Covid-19 later than other territories, health officials have since declared it one of four French departments suffering from an “exceptional” spike in deaths.
The combination of large families in cramped quarters and the lack of doctors and hospital beds has left the local population particularly exposed to the virus. And while many Parisians fled to countryside homes or switched to working from home, the capital’s poorer suburbs have supplied most of the workers who keep the metropolis running.
“Nurses, cashiers, caregivers, street cleaners, security agents, delivery men… Basically all the people who prop up the country today, all those who hold the front line and put themselves in danger, they come from the working-class districts, from [Seine-Saint-Denis]!” said Stéphane Peu, a local communist lawmaker, in an interview with Le Monde.
The French newspaper notes that several other factors conspire to make the coronavirus lockdown more challenging in banlieue high-rises than elsewhere in France, including the dearth of food outlets. In northern Bondy, for instance, there is just one supermarket for a population of 21,000.
Seine-Saint-Denis is also home to France’s youngest population, with 30% of inhabitants aged under 20.
“By and large, the lockdown is being respected in the suburbs, but there comes a point when restless youths in overcrowded homes need a breath of fresh air,” says Echi-Chetouani, lamenting the authorities’ failure to prepare for lockdown.
“There has simply been no outreach, no attempt to explain to the locals how the virus spreads and why social distancing is important to protect vulnerable family members,” he adds. “All we got was an order to stay home, followed by repression.”
Police clash with residents in Paris suburbs amid lockdown
Issued on: 20/04/2020
The tensions were ignited in the early hours of Saturday when a motorcyclist was injured during a police check GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT AFP
ALL VIDEOS ARE AT THE END
Paris (AFP)
Police fought running battles overnight in Paris's low-income northern suburbs with residents alleging heavy-handedness by officers enforcing France's strict coronavirus lockdown.
Residents burned trash and cars and shot fireworks at police, who responded with rubber bullets and tear gas in the suburbs of Villeneuve-la-Garenne and Aulnay-sous-Bois, witnesses and police said on Monday.
The tensions were ignited in the early hours of Saturday when a motorcyclist was injured during a police check in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, prompting about 50 angry bystanders to gather.
A police statement said the group targeted officers with "projectiles" in a near two-hour standoff.
The motorcyclist, 30, was hospitalised with a broken leg and had to undergo surgery after he had crashed into the open door of a police car.
Residents allege the door was opened deliberately so that the rider would smash into it.
The man will lodge a complaint against the officers, his family and a lawyer told AFP, while prosecutors have opened an investigation.
By Monday morning, calm had returned to Villeneuve-la-Garenne after a second night of riots marked by suburban fires and explosions, an AFP journalist observed.
The trouble had also spread to nearby Aulnay-sous-Bois, where police claimed they were "ambushed" by residents in a district of dense, high-rise social housing of mainly immigrant occupants who claim they are regularly the victims of harsh police treatment.
Police said they were targeted by residents using fireworks as projectiles. Four were arrested.
- 'Confinement and tensions' -
After the motorcyclist was injured on Saturday, rights group SOS Racisme issued a statement calling on authorities to shed full light on the incident, and urging police restraint "in this time of confinement and tensions".
Earlier this month, prosecutors opened an investigation into the death in detention of a 33-year-old man arrested for allegedly violating the home confinement measures imposed by the government to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
Police said the man resisted arrest. According to his sister, he had suffered from schizophrenia.
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said Sunday police had carried out 13.5 million checks since the lockdown started on March 17, with people allowed outside only for essential purposes, and then with a self-certified letter explaining their reasons for leaving their home.
More than 800,000 people were written up for violations.
Several complaints of brutality were lodged against French police during recent months of pension reform protests and "yellow vest" anti-government rallies.
© 2020 AFP
ALL VIDEOS ARE AT THE END
Paris (AFP)
Police fought running battles overnight in Paris's low-income northern suburbs with residents alleging heavy-handedness by officers enforcing France's strict coronavirus lockdown.
Residents burned trash and cars and shot fireworks at police, who responded with rubber bullets and tear gas in the suburbs of Villeneuve-la-Garenne and Aulnay-sous-Bois, witnesses and police said on Monday.
The tensions were ignited in the early hours of Saturday when a motorcyclist was injured during a police check in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, prompting about 50 angry bystanders to gather.
A police statement said the group targeted officers with "projectiles" in a near two-hour standoff.
The motorcyclist, 30, was hospitalised with a broken leg and had to undergo surgery after he had crashed into the open door of a police car.
Residents allege the door was opened deliberately so that the rider would smash into it.
The man will lodge a complaint against the officers, his family and a lawyer told AFP, while prosecutors have opened an investigation.
By Monday morning, calm had returned to Villeneuve-la-Garenne after a second night of riots marked by suburban fires and explosions, an AFP journalist observed.
The trouble had also spread to nearby Aulnay-sous-Bois, where police claimed they were "ambushed" by residents in a district of dense, high-rise social housing of mainly immigrant occupants who claim they are regularly the victims of harsh police treatment.
Police said they were targeted by residents using fireworks as projectiles. Four were arrested.
- 'Confinement and tensions' -
After the motorcyclist was injured on Saturday, rights group SOS Racisme issued a statement calling on authorities to shed full light on the incident, and urging police restraint "in this time of confinement and tensions".
Earlier this month, prosecutors opened an investigation into the death in detention of a 33-year-old man arrested for allegedly violating the home confinement measures imposed by the government to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
Police said the man resisted arrest. According to his sister, he had suffered from schizophrenia.
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said Sunday police had carried out 13.5 million checks since the lockdown started on March 17, with people allowed outside only for essential purposes, and then with a self-certified letter explaining their reasons for leaving their home.
More than 800,000 people were written up for violations.
Several complaints of brutality were lodged against French police during recent months of pension reform protests and "yellow vest" anti-government rallies.
© 2020 AFP
Anti-lockdown riots break out in Paris amid anger at police 'heavy-handed' treatment of minorities after Macron extends social distancing to fight COVID-19 until May 11
Tear gas and baton charges were used by police in northern suburb of Paris
Squads of Republican Security Company officers were called in to tackle dissent
Comes after 30-year-old motorcyclist was critically injured by police car
Tear gas and baton charges were used by police in northern suburb of Paris
Squads of Republican Security Company officers were called in to tackle dissent
Comes after 30-year-old motorcyclist was critically injured by police car
By PETER ALLEN FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 19/20 April 2020
Riots have broken out in Paris amid anger over police 'heavy-handed' treatment of ethnic minorities during the coronavirus lockdown.
Police used tear gas and baton charges in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, northern Paris, in the early hours this morning as fireworks exploded in the street.
Armed police were seen moving through the area as groups of protesters congregated.
It comes after a 30-year-old was critically injured in the neighbourhood in a collision with an unmarked police car.
President Emmanuel Macron has extended France's social distancing measures until May 11. Its daily death toll from the virus fell to the lowest level in three weeks today as 395 deaths were recorded, bringing the total to 19,718, though deaths are typically under-reported over the weekend.
Riots have broken out in the Parisian suburb of Villeneuve-la-Garenne following allegations of heavy handedness against ethnic minorities by police forces. (Pictured: An officer asks a journalist to step back in the suburb early on Monday morning)
A firework explodes in the middle of the street in the French suburb early this morning
Des unités de police répondent aux feux d’artifices par des tirs de grenades lacrymogènes.#VilleneuveLaGarenne pic.twitter.com/A7CP6hRCjS— Taha Bouhafs (@T_Bouhafs) April 19, 2020
Protesters fired fireworks at buildings and into police officers in early hours of this morning
A car waits at a cross roads in the neighbourhood as fireworks explode overhead
Overnight anti-lockdown riots in Paris suburb leave streets on fireFireworks dyed the sky red above the Parisian suburb early this morning, videos posted on social media show.
Bins were also filmed blazing and filling the air with smoke as armed police moved into the area.
Videos of the trouble posted by the French journalist Taha Bouhafs, who is from an Algerian background, includes one of him being manhandled by police – leading to allegations of racism.
Mr Bouhaf’s earlier images show tear gas canisters being fired by the police, who were hit my numerous fireworks.
The early morning violence followed prosecutors opening an enquiry after a 30-year-old motorcyclist was critically injured following a collision with an unmarked police car in Villeneuve-la-Garenne.
Friends of the victim, who have not been named, claimed the incident on Saturday night was an example of police heavy-handedness against ethnic minority communities during the lockdown.
‘The very badly injured man comes from an Arab Muslim background,’ said a source close to the case.
‘He is critical in hospital, and people in the area have reacted very badly to what has happened.’
A local police spokesman said: ‘Police and their reinforcements have been the target of rioters, who have thrown stones and fireworks.
‘The violence started in Villeneuve-la-Garenne and has spread to other towns and estates nearby.’
Protesters let off fireworks. The riots were triggered after a 30-year-old man was severely injured in a collision with an unmarked police car in the area
Police threw tear gas and baton charges as they moved to disperse protesters in the area
A police officer was seen carrying a large gun as they moved through the neighbourhood
Last week prosecutors in Béziers, in the south of France, announced that officers were facing criminal charges after a father-of-three died while under arrest for breaching the Coronavirus lockdown.
Three officers were videoed dragging Mohamed Gabsi, 33, along the ground during a curfew.
They are suspected of ‘intentional violence by a public official leading to manslaughter’ and ‘non assistance of a person in danger’.
The offences come with a potential combined prison sentence of 15 years plus, said local prosecutors.
The case is particularly sensitive because Mr Gabsi was a Muslim, and Béziers is run by a far-Right mayor who is supported by the National Rally party, which used to be called the National Front.
Mr Gabsi had suffered a heart attack by the time he arrived at a local police station, and witnesses saw two of the officers sitting on top of him in their patrol car.
Mr Gabsi’s suspicious death follows numerous complaints about police racism as forces across France enforce one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe.
A spokesman for France’s Human Rights League described the death of Mr Gabsi, who was from an Arab background, as a ‘scandal that shows how the poor are being killed’ by the lockdown.
French journalist Taha Bouhafs, who is from an Algerian background, is manhandled by police
Two officers hold the journalist's arms behind his back. He was reporting on the protests
France on Tuesday reported a total of 19,718 deaths from coronavirus since the start of the health emergency. A total of 152,894 cases have also been detected in the country.
Its stringent lockdown measures are 'working', Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told a press conference today.
French authorities have said they will publish plans for ending the lockdown 'within two weeks', and begins to air their strategy 'in the coming days'.
'It is likely that we are not going to see an end to confinement that would happen in one move everywhere and for everyone,' Mr Philippe said, revealing details of the strategy.
The French lockdown could lead to a 10 per cent contraction in the French economy this year.
The country has been in lockdown from March 17, and this will continue until at least May 11.
Coronavirus Underscores Injustices in France's Working-class Suburbs
By Lisa Bryant April 17, 2020
FILE - Housing blocks are seen in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, France.
PARIS - On a national discrimination hotline that she helps manage, Rafaelle Parlier hears troubling reports: a veiled woman fined by police for using her veil as a face mask, and a man of North African descent similarly sanctioned for picking up his wife, a nurse, from her hospital shift — although both had appropriate justifications.
“These are practices we usually denounce,” said Parlier, who works for anti-discrimination coalition En finir avec les contrôles au faciès (End Racial Profiling). “The confinement just makes it easier.”
FRANCE DISPATCH NEW YORK TIMES
‘Like a Prison’: Paris Suburbs Simmer Under Coronavirus Lockdown
A combination of cramped quarters, economic stress and accusations of police abuse is inflaming tensions in the poorer districts around the city.
By Adam Nossiter
Published April 10, 2020 Updated April 13, 2020
CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France — The young men, immigrants with no papers and nowhere to go, chatted at close quarters outside the shopping strip, social distancing be damned. Above loomed the shabby facade of one of France’s most notorious housing blocks, packed with families waiting out confinement.
The pain of the moment is concentrated in this dense, impoverished district of the Paris immigrant suburbs, one of four French areas, including Paris and Alsace, hit by “an exceptional excess” of coronavirus deaths, France’s national health director said this week.
Much of Paris — perhaps a quarter of the population — packed up and went off to the countryside when the French government announced strict confinement rules on March 16. But just across the line in Seine-Saint-Denis, France’s poorest department, people didn’t have that choice.
Inside the Paris city limits, the streets are now as quiet as any French provincial town on a Sunday; in the suburbs the streets are mostly empty too. But the apartments are full.
Handing out food on Tuesday.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
The grim and tired faces of the residents, lining up to get into the post office or the supermarket in the worn shopping strip, tell the story: small public housing apartments packed with families, jobs that have disappeared and an aggressive police force clamping down on youth restless with the confinement rules.
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The combination of cramped quarters, acute economic stress and tough policing has made Paris’s poorer suburbs a more dangerous place for the virus to spread, as well as a special source of tension during the epidemic.
Relations between residents and the police, with their undercurrent of racial discrimination, are often fraught even in the best of times, and the current lockdown is not one of them.
Over and over, residents compared the confinement rules to conditions in a prison, and they charged that the police were taking advantage of their mandate to keep the streets clear by harassing, even beating, youths, no questions asked. Some are warning that the pressures are ripe to explode.
“We’ve got a lot of young people in big families, shut up in tiny apartments, and it’s difficult to close them up like that,” said Bilal Chikri, a filmmaker who lives in the neighborhood. “There’s a lot of clashes with the police, lots of police missteps, lots of abuse of power.”
The approach has left residents vulnerable to both the police and the virus. Paris had 732 virus deaths compared with 402 in Seine-Saint-Denis as of April 8, but the city has half again the population of the suburb, where many of the metropolis’s cashiers, deliverymen, transit workers, nurses and couriers live.
“This is getting really tough,” said Larry Karache, an out-of-work shopkeeper, standing outside Chêne Pointu, the housing project where France’s 2005 urban riots were born, and which was depicted in last year’s hit film “Les Misérables.” “We’re actually in prison here.”
“People can’t support their families anymore,’’ he added. “And with the cops now, it’s all about score-settling.”
A residential compound reflected in a window of a food donation outpost.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
The stresses, from a lack of money and small spaces, were accumulating.
“It’s like a prison. There are three of us in two rooms,” said Drissa Fofana, an out-of-work construction worker. “But we’ve got to accept it. If this goes on, the little that we’ve got saved up will be all gone,” he said.
Another resident, Mama Traoré, echoed the complaint. “It’s hard,” she said, grimacing as she bent over her shopping cart outside the post office at Chêne Pointu. “I’ve got four kids and three rooms. Too small. With all the noise, I’ve always got a headache.”
Outside the apartment blocks, small groups gather, here and there, mostly at bus stops. But the wide streets are largely quiet.
“On the whole, people are respecting the confinement rules,” said Hamza Esmili, a sociologist who has studied the Paris suburbs. “There isn’t a sort of collective indiscipline about it.”
“But the illness has the potential to continue spreading,” Mr. Esmili warned.
The real danger comes not from people congregating outside, but from the cramped apartments where extended families are packed.
“On the exterior, the confinement is being observed,” said Frédéric Adnet, head of emergency services in the Seine-Saint-Denis department. “It’s not there that the problem is playing out.”
Playing at a housing complex.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
“We’re seeing whole families arrive in the emergency rooms,” he said. “There’s familial contamination. People live, five or six, in little, little apartments.”
Paris had its exodus to country homes. “We didn’t see that in the Seine-Saint-Denis,” Mr. Adnet said. “They don’t have country homes here. So we didn’t benefit from that drop in the population.”
In the last few days the pressure on the area’s three public hospitals has eased a little, officials said. But the tension inside the tired old apartment blocks is spilling into the streets.
The French police have come down hard, in the accounts of several residents, responding to perceived lapses in the confinement rules with beatings, harassment, humiliation and intimidation.
A coalition of rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, denounced “unacceptable and illegal behavior” by the police in the Paris suburbs in a March 27 statement, saying the health crisis “doesn’t mean a break with the rule of law and doesn’t justify discriminatory checks or unjustified force.”
It noted that these abuses “are common, and rarely punished” in France.
Inside a residential building.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
A leading police union, in a post on Twitter, called the residents’ accounts “fables,” and blamed them on “little Dzerjinskis” — a reference to a celebrated Bolshevik revolutionary — who are “holed up in the Latin Quarter, or their country homes.”
But the accounts are consistent, widespread and tied to the French government’s confinement rules. Since March 17 authorities have demanded a self-signed interior ministry release form giving one of four preapproved reasons for being outside.
In the Paris suburbs, if the police catch you without the form, or if there is an error on it, you are in trouble, residents said.
“The police just jump in, just like that, with force,” said Fiston Kabunda, who works as a mediator for the city of Clichy-sous-Bois. “There’s no discussion.”
“It’s an abuse of power: ‘We’re going to beat up some black and Arab,’” he added.
“Look, it’s like this: The police come, and they start to beat up on the kids,” he said. “They’re not even checking them. It’s brutality, no questions asked.”
A spokesman for the police prefecture of Paris, which is responsible for Seine-Saint-Denis, said the police would not comment on accusations that were “not specific.”
A commercial area in Clichy-sous-Bois.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Mr. Chikri, the filmmaker, said he had forgotten his release form in his car when a group of police surrounded him last week, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, kicked him and squeezed his carotid artery. “You can stuff your release form,” the police told him, Mr. Chikri recalled.
“With these guys, it’s all hatred and violence,” he said.
The police in Paris did not respond to a specific inquiry about Mr. Chikri’s accusations.
In a video widely circulating on French social media, a young man in the suburb of Les Ulis can be heard screaming in pain during a police “check” for a missing release form.
“He was savagely beaten with truncheons, fists and kicks until he fell to the ground, but the punishment continued,” said a criminal complaint filed on behalf of Sofiane Naoufel El Allaki, a 21-year-old deliveryman for Amazon, by a Paris human rights lawyer, Samim Bolaky.
“The screams of Mr. El Allaki penetrated the whole neighborhood,” the complaint said.
“This is not about confrontation,” Mr. Bolaky said. “This is not urban violence. The streets are deserted. They didn’t even ask him for his release form. He didn’t resist at all.”
The police in the Essone department, where the incident took place, did not respond to a specific inquiry about Mr. El Allaki’s claims. Mr. El Allaki’s case is one of several involving police violence being investigated by prosecutors.
Mr. Esmili, the sociologist, warned that the way the authorities were enforcing the lockdown was only reinforcing the worst expectations of many in France’s poorest areas.
“Look, the state is completely ignoring how people live in these neighborhoods,” he said. “Its only response to them is an excess of authoritarianism. And the people are beginning to understand, the only response is police force.”
Clichy-sous-Bois is in Seine-Saint-Denis, France’s poorest department.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Constant Meheut contributed reporting.
Adam Nossiter is the Paris bureau chief. Previously, he was a Paris correspondent, the West Africa bureau chief, and led the team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage of the Ebola epidemic.
A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2020, Section A, Page 5 o
PUBLISHED: 19/20 April 2020
Riots have broken out in Paris amid anger over police 'heavy-handed' treatment of ethnic minorities during the coronavirus lockdown.
Police used tear gas and baton charges in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, northern Paris, in the early hours this morning as fireworks exploded in the street.
Armed police were seen moving through the area as groups of protesters congregated.
It comes after a 30-year-old was critically injured in the neighbourhood in a collision with an unmarked police car.
President Emmanuel Macron has extended France's social distancing measures until May 11. Its daily death toll from the virus fell to the lowest level in three weeks today as 395 deaths were recorded, bringing the total to 19,718, though deaths are typically under-reported over the weekend.
Riots have broken out in the Parisian suburb of Villeneuve-la-Garenne following allegations of heavy handedness against ethnic minorities by police forces. (Pictured: An officer asks a journalist to step back in the suburb early on Monday morning)
A firework explodes in the middle of the street in the French suburb early this morning
Des unités de police répondent aux feux d’artifices par des tirs de grenades lacrymogènes.#VilleneuveLaGarenne pic.twitter.com/A7CP6hRCjS— Taha Bouhafs (@T_Bouhafs) April 19, 2020
Protesters fired fireworks at buildings and into police officers in early hours of this morning
A car waits at a cross roads in the neighbourhood as fireworks explode overhead
Overnight anti-lockdown riots in Paris suburb leave streets on fireFireworks dyed the sky red above the Parisian suburb early this morning, videos posted on social media show.
Bins were also filmed blazing and filling the air with smoke as armed police moved into the area.
Videos of the trouble posted by the French journalist Taha Bouhafs, who is from an Algerian background, includes one of him being manhandled by police – leading to allegations of racism.
Mr Bouhaf’s earlier images show tear gas canisters being fired by the police, who were hit my numerous fireworks.
The early morning violence followed prosecutors opening an enquiry after a 30-year-old motorcyclist was critically injured following a collision with an unmarked police car in Villeneuve-la-Garenne.
Friends of the victim, who have not been named, claimed the incident on Saturday night was an example of police heavy-handedness against ethnic minority communities during the lockdown.
‘The very badly injured man comes from an Arab Muslim background,’ said a source close to the case.
‘He is critical in hospital, and people in the area have reacted very badly to what has happened.’
A local police spokesman said: ‘Police and their reinforcements have been the target of rioters, who have thrown stones and fireworks.
‘The violence started in Villeneuve-la-Garenne and has spread to other towns and estates nearby.’
Protesters let off fireworks. The riots were triggered after a 30-year-old man was severely injured in a collision with an unmarked police car in the area
Police threw tear gas and baton charges as they moved to disperse protesters in the area
A police officer was seen carrying a large gun as they moved through the neighbourhood
Last week prosecutors in Béziers, in the south of France, announced that officers were facing criminal charges after a father-of-three died while under arrest for breaching the Coronavirus lockdown.
Three officers were videoed dragging Mohamed Gabsi, 33, along the ground during a curfew.
They are suspected of ‘intentional violence by a public official leading to manslaughter’ and ‘non assistance of a person in danger’.
The offences come with a potential combined prison sentence of 15 years plus, said local prosecutors.
The case is particularly sensitive because Mr Gabsi was a Muslim, and Béziers is run by a far-Right mayor who is supported by the National Rally party, which used to be called the National Front.
Mr Gabsi had suffered a heart attack by the time he arrived at a local police station, and witnesses saw two of the officers sitting on top of him in their patrol car.
Mr Gabsi’s suspicious death follows numerous complaints about police racism as forces across France enforce one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe.
A spokesman for France’s Human Rights League described the death of Mr Gabsi, who was from an Arab background, as a ‘scandal that shows how the poor are being killed’ by the lockdown.
French journalist Taha Bouhafs, who is from an Algerian background, is manhandled by police
Two officers hold the journalist's arms behind his back. He was reporting on the protests
France on Tuesday reported a total of 19,718 deaths from coronavirus since the start of the health emergency. A total of 152,894 cases have also been detected in the country.
Its stringent lockdown measures are 'working', Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told a press conference today.
French authorities have said they will publish plans for ending the lockdown 'within two weeks', and begins to air their strategy 'in the coming days'.
'It is likely that we are not going to see an end to confinement that would happen in one move everywhere and for everyone,' Mr Philippe said, revealing details of the strategy.
The French lockdown could lead to a 10 per cent contraction in the French economy this year.
The country has been in lockdown from March 17, and this will continue until at least May 11.
Coronavirus Underscores Injustices in France's Working-class Suburbs
By Lisa Bryant April 17, 2020
FILE - Housing blocks are seen in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, France.
PARIS - On a national discrimination hotline that she helps manage, Rafaelle Parlier hears troubling reports: a veiled woman fined by police for using her veil as a face mask, and a man of North African descent similarly sanctioned for picking up his wife, a nurse, from her hospital shift — although both had appropriate justifications.
“These are practices we usually denounce,” said Parlier, who works for anti-discrimination coalition En finir avec les contrôles au faciès (End Racial Profiling). “The confinement just makes it easier.”
A woman walks in front of a hotel of the Accor group in Paris, April 16, 2020, during a nationwide confinement to counter the coronavirus. The Accor facilities are taking in people with COVID-19 who show no symptoms but risk infecting others.
If COVID-19 touches all of France, its effects are not being felt equally. Poor, ethnically diverse residents are suffering disproportionately, rights activists and local officials say. The fallout varies, from reports of police intimidation and violence to more arduous conditions under lockdown and potentially more coronavirus cases than elsewhere in the country.
“The problem with this epidemic is that it underscores all the other pre-existing inequalities,” said Laurent Russier, mayor of Saint-Denis, a working-class Paris suburb with a large immigrant population. “And Saint-Denis is marked by sharp inequalities.”
Few areas manifest the national disparities more sharply than the broader Seine-Saint-Denis department, France’s poorest region, where Russier’s town is located. A recent government report found a sharp spike in deaths during the last half of March, when the COVID-19 lockdown began — higher than in neighboring departments.
While the government has not linked the uptick to coronavirus, local officials list a raft of underlying weaknesses in the banlieues, as the gritty, working-class suburbs are called.
Disparities ‘that kill’
In an op-ed piece, Russier joined a half-dozen mayors and elected officials in outlining several disparities “that kill” in the Seine-Saint-Denis department — in justice, security, health, education and jobs.
While some Parisians headed to country houses to wait out the pandemic, and a number are telecommuting for work, many of Russier’s residents have "front-line" jobs as health aides, supermarket cashiers and delivery workers, sometimes without protective masks. Peeling housing projects sometimes pack large, intergenerational families into tiny, unhealthy spaces, creating coronavirus clusters in some cases.
“So if someone catches COVID-19 in an apartment that’s multigenerational, the contagion is more rapid,” Russier said, “and the confinement is harder.”
Some banlieue graveyards report they are close to saturation, a situation that has not been helped by the recent uptick in deaths.
“Usually, I sign three or four burial certificates a week. But over the last few weeks, I’m signing three or four a day,” Sylvine Thomassin, mayor of another working-class suburb, told Le Monde newspaper.
If COVID-19 touches all of France, its effects are not being felt equally. Poor, ethnically diverse residents are suffering disproportionately, rights activists and local officials say. The fallout varies, from reports of police intimidation and violence to more arduous conditions under lockdown and potentially more coronavirus cases than elsewhere in the country.
“The problem with this epidemic is that it underscores all the other pre-existing inequalities,” said Laurent Russier, mayor of Saint-Denis, a working-class Paris suburb with a large immigrant population. “And Saint-Denis is marked by sharp inequalities.”
Few areas manifest the national disparities more sharply than the broader Seine-Saint-Denis department, France’s poorest region, where Russier’s town is located. A recent government report found a sharp spike in deaths during the last half of March, when the COVID-19 lockdown began — higher than in neighboring departments.
While the government has not linked the uptick to coronavirus, local officials list a raft of underlying weaknesses in the banlieues, as the gritty, working-class suburbs are called.
Disparities ‘that kill’
In an op-ed piece, Russier joined a half-dozen mayors and elected officials in outlining several disparities “that kill” in the Seine-Saint-Denis department — in justice, security, health, education and jobs.
While some Parisians headed to country houses to wait out the pandemic, and a number are telecommuting for work, many of Russier’s residents have "front-line" jobs as health aides, supermarket cashiers and delivery workers, sometimes without protective masks. Peeling housing projects sometimes pack large, intergenerational families into tiny, unhealthy spaces, creating coronavirus clusters in some cases.
“So if someone catches COVID-19 in an apartment that’s multigenerational, the contagion is more rapid,” Russier said, “and the confinement is harder.”
Some banlieue graveyards report they are close to saturation, a situation that has not been helped by the recent uptick in deaths.
“Usually, I sign three or four burial certificates a week. But over the last few weeks, I’m signing three or four a day,” Sylvine Thomassin, mayor of another working-class suburb, told Le Monde newspaper.
FILE - A family watches French President Emmanuel Macron's televised speech, April 13, 2020, in Lyon, central France. Macron announced an extension of France's nationwide lockdown until May 11.
The message seems to have hit home with the French government. Addressing the nation Monday, President Emmanuel Macron — who has earned underwhelming marks for addressing banlieue grievances — promised nearly $1 billion more in financial aid for poor families.
France’s banlieues have long been considered flashpoints for unresolved social and economic grievances. In 2005, they exploded into rioting — a theme of the recent hit movie “Les Miserables” — revealing the tense and violent relationship between police and banlieue youngsters.
Old story, new context
Today, the coronavirus simply offers a new context for discriminatory treatment, some activists say. Several videos posted on social media show police slapping and otherwise harassing youngsters for allegedly violating tough lockdown measures. In some cases, the young people have filed legal complaints.
“The issue of police violence is not new. It’s the usual targets, this time with the pretext of enforcing the confinement,” said Lanna Hollo, senior legal officer with the Open Society Justice Initiative in Paris.
"There are young people terrified to go out,” she added. “They may be the ones charged with the shopping or who have to go to work, and they’re afraid of being abused.”
In the Seine-Saint-Denis department, mayors and other officials say residents are largely following lockdown measures. Russier is among them.
But he denies excessive police behavior — at least in his town.
"There are some youngsters who don’t respect confinement, in some cases, defiantly,” he said. “But police are being careful. The idea is to avoid confrontation. They are very, very vigilant not to pour oil into the fire.”
The message seems to have hit home with the French government. Addressing the nation Monday, President Emmanuel Macron — who has earned underwhelming marks for addressing banlieue grievances — promised nearly $1 billion more in financial aid for poor families.
France’s banlieues have long been considered flashpoints for unresolved social and economic grievances. In 2005, they exploded into rioting — a theme of the recent hit movie “Les Miserables” — revealing the tense and violent relationship between police and banlieue youngsters.
Old story, new context
Today, the coronavirus simply offers a new context for discriminatory treatment, some activists say. Several videos posted on social media show police slapping and otherwise harassing youngsters for allegedly violating tough lockdown measures. In some cases, the young people have filed legal complaints.
“The issue of police violence is not new. It’s the usual targets, this time with the pretext of enforcing the confinement,” said Lanna Hollo, senior legal officer with the Open Society Justice Initiative in Paris.
"There are young people terrified to go out,” she added. “They may be the ones charged with the shopping or who have to go to work, and they’re afraid of being abused.”
In the Seine-Saint-Denis department, mayors and other officials say residents are largely following lockdown measures. Russier is among them.
But he denies excessive police behavior — at least in his town.
"There are some youngsters who don’t respect confinement, in some cases, defiantly,” he said. “But police are being careful. The idea is to avoid confrontation. They are very, very vigilant not to pour oil into the fire.”
FRANCE DISPATCH NEW YORK TIMES
‘Like a Prison’: Paris Suburbs Simmer Under Coronavirus Lockdown
A combination of cramped quarters, economic stress and accusations of police abuse is inflaming tensions in the poorer districts around the city.
Clichy-sous-Bois, an eastern suburb of Paris, is one of four French areas hit by “an exceptional excess” of coronavirus deaths, France’s national health director said Tuesday night.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
By Adam Nossiter
Published April 10, 2020 Updated April 13, 2020
CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France — The young men, immigrants with no papers and nowhere to go, chatted at close quarters outside the shopping strip, social distancing be damned. Above loomed the shabby facade of one of France’s most notorious housing blocks, packed with families waiting out confinement.
The pain of the moment is concentrated in this dense, impoverished district of the Paris immigrant suburbs, one of four French areas, including Paris and Alsace, hit by “an exceptional excess” of coronavirus deaths, France’s national health director said this week.
Much of Paris — perhaps a quarter of the population — packed up and went off to the countryside when the French government announced strict confinement rules on March 16. But just across the line in Seine-Saint-Denis, France’s poorest department, people didn’t have that choice.
Inside the Paris city limits, the streets are now as quiet as any French provincial town on a Sunday; in the suburbs the streets are mostly empty too. But the apartments are full.
The grim and tired faces of the residents, lining up to get into the post office or the supermarket in the worn shopping strip, tell the story: small public housing apartments packed with families, jobs that have disappeared and an aggressive police force clamping down on youth restless with the confinement rules.
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The combination of cramped quarters, acute economic stress and tough policing has made Paris’s poorer suburbs a more dangerous place for the virus to spread, as well as a special source of tension during the epidemic.
Relations between residents and the police, with their undercurrent of racial discrimination, are often fraught even in the best of times, and the current lockdown is not one of them.
Over and over, residents compared the confinement rules to conditions in a prison, and they charged that the police were taking advantage of their mandate to keep the streets clear by harassing, even beating, youths, no questions asked. Some are warning that the pressures are ripe to explode.
“We’ve got a lot of young people in big families, shut up in tiny apartments, and it’s difficult to close them up like that,” said Bilal Chikri, a filmmaker who lives in the neighborhood. “There’s a lot of clashes with the police, lots of police missteps, lots of abuse of power.”
The approach has left residents vulnerable to both the police and the virus. Paris had 732 virus deaths compared with 402 in Seine-Saint-Denis as of April 8, but the city has half again the population of the suburb, where many of the metropolis’s cashiers, deliverymen, transit workers, nurses and couriers live.
“This is getting really tough,” said Larry Karache, an out-of-work shopkeeper, standing outside Chêne Pointu, the housing project where France’s 2005 urban riots were born, and which was depicted in last year’s hit film “Les Misérables.” “We’re actually in prison here.”
“People can’t support their families anymore,’’ he added. “And with the cops now, it’s all about score-settling.”
A residential compound reflected in a window of a food donation outpost.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
The stresses, from a lack of money and small spaces, were accumulating.
“It’s like a prison. There are three of us in two rooms,” said Drissa Fofana, an out-of-work construction worker. “But we’ve got to accept it. If this goes on, the little that we’ve got saved up will be all gone,” he said.
Another resident, Mama Traoré, echoed the complaint. “It’s hard,” she said, grimacing as she bent over her shopping cart outside the post office at Chêne Pointu. “I’ve got four kids and three rooms. Too small. With all the noise, I’ve always got a headache.”
Outside the apartment blocks, small groups gather, here and there, mostly at bus stops. But the wide streets are largely quiet.
“On the whole, people are respecting the confinement rules,” said Hamza Esmili, a sociologist who has studied the Paris suburbs. “There isn’t a sort of collective indiscipline about it.”
“But the illness has the potential to continue spreading,” Mr. Esmili warned.
The real danger comes not from people congregating outside, but from the cramped apartments where extended families are packed.
“On the exterior, the confinement is being observed,” said Frédéric Adnet, head of emergency services in the Seine-Saint-Denis department. “It’s not there that the problem is playing out.”
Playing at a housing complex.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
“We’re seeing whole families arrive in the emergency rooms,” he said. “There’s familial contamination. People live, five or six, in little, little apartments.”
Paris had its exodus to country homes. “We didn’t see that in the Seine-Saint-Denis,” Mr. Adnet said. “They don’t have country homes here. So we didn’t benefit from that drop in the population.”
In the last few days the pressure on the area’s three public hospitals has eased a little, officials said. But the tension inside the tired old apartment blocks is spilling into the streets.
The French police have come down hard, in the accounts of several residents, responding to perceived lapses in the confinement rules with beatings, harassment, humiliation and intimidation.
A coalition of rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, denounced “unacceptable and illegal behavior” by the police in the Paris suburbs in a March 27 statement, saying the health crisis “doesn’t mean a break with the rule of law and doesn’t justify discriminatory checks or unjustified force.”
It noted that these abuses “are common, and rarely punished” in France.
Inside a residential building.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
A leading police union, in a post on Twitter, called the residents’ accounts “fables,” and blamed them on “little Dzerjinskis” — a reference to a celebrated Bolshevik revolutionary — who are “holed up in the Latin Quarter, or their country homes.”
But the accounts are consistent, widespread and tied to the French government’s confinement rules. Since March 17 authorities have demanded a self-signed interior ministry release form giving one of four preapproved reasons for being outside.
In the Paris suburbs, if the police catch you without the form, or if there is an error on it, you are in trouble, residents said.
“The police just jump in, just like that, with force,” said Fiston Kabunda, who works as a mediator for the city of Clichy-sous-Bois. “There’s no discussion.”
“It’s an abuse of power: ‘We’re going to beat up some black and Arab,’” he added.
“Look, it’s like this: The police come, and they start to beat up on the kids,” he said. “They’re not even checking them. It’s brutality, no questions asked.”
A spokesman for the police prefecture of Paris, which is responsible for Seine-Saint-Denis, said the police would not comment on accusations that were “not specific.”
A commercial area in Clichy-sous-Bois.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Mr. Chikri, the filmmaker, said he had forgotten his release form in his car when a group of police surrounded him last week, threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, kicked him and squeezed his carotid artery. “You can stuff your release form,” the police told him, Mr. Chikri recalled.
“With these guys, it’s all hatred and violence,” he said.
The police in Paris did not respond to a specific inquiry about Mr. Chikri’s accusations.
In a video widely circulating on French social media, a young man in the suburb of Les Ulis can be heard screaming in pain during a police “check” for a missing release form.
“He was savagely beaten with truncheons, fists and kicks until he fell to the ground, but the punishment continued,” said a criminal complaint filed on behalf of Sofiane Naoufel El Allaki, a 21-year-old deliveryman for Amazon, by a Paris human rights lawyer, Samim Bolaky.
“The screams of Mr. El Allaki penetrated the whole neighborhood,” the complaint said.
“This is not about confrontation,” Mr. Bolaky said. “This is not urban violence. The streets are deserted. They didn’t even ask him for his release form. He didn’t resist at all.”
The police in the Essone department, where the incident took place, did not respond to a specific inquiry about Mr. El Allaki’s claims. Mr. El Allaki’s case is one of several involving police violence being investigated by prosecutors.
Mr. Esmili, the sociologist, warned that the way the authorities were enforcing the lockdown was only reinforcing the worst expectations of many in France’s poorest areas.
“Look, the state is completely ignoring how people live in these neighborhoods,” he said. “Its only response to them is an excess of authoritarianism. And the people are beginning to understand, the only response is police force.”
Clichy-sous-Bois is in Seine-Saint-Denis, France’s poorest department.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Constant Meheut contributed reporting.
Adam Nossiter is the Paris bureau chief. Previously, he was a Paris correspondent, the West Africa bureau chief, and led the team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for coverage of the Ebola epidemic.
A version of this article appears in print on April 11, 2020, Section A, Page 5 o
