France braced for another feared eruption of urban rioting today after the deadly police shooting of a suburban 17-year-old, with tens of thousands of officers hitting the streets and commuters rushing home before transport services closed down early for safety reasons.
Despite government appeals for calm and vows that order would be restored, smoke from cars and rubbish set ablaze was already billowing over the streets of the Paris suburb of Nanterre following a peaceful afternoon march in honour of the teen identified only by his first name, Nahel.
The police officer accused of pulling the trigger was handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide after prosecutor Pascal Prache said his initial investigation led him to conclude “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met”.
After a morning crisis meeting following violence that injured scores of police and damaged nearly 100 public buildings, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said the number of police officers would more than quadruple, from 9,000 to 40,000. In the Paris region alone, the number of officers deployed would more than double to 5,000.
“The professionals of disorder must go home,” Darmanin said. While there’s no need yet to declare a state of emergency - a measure taken to quell weeks of rioting in 2005 - he added “The state’s response will be extremely firm.”
Bus and tram services in the Paris area were shutting down before sunset as a precaution to safeguard transportation workers and passengers, a decision sure to impact thousands of travellers in the French capital and its suburbs.
“Our transports are not targets for thugs and vandals!” Valerie Pecresse, head of the Paris region tweeted.
The town of Clamart, home to 54,000 people in the French capital’s southwest suburbs, said it was taking the extraordinary step of putting an overnight curfew in place from 9pm until 6am through the weekend.
It cited “the risk of new public order disturbances” for the decision, after two nights of urban unrest. “Clamart is a safe and calm town, we are determined that it stay that way,” it said.
The shooting captured on video shocked the country and stirred up long-simmering tensions between police and young people in housing projects and other disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
The teenager’s family and their lawyers haven’t said the police shooting was race-related and they didn’t release his surname or details about him.
Still, his death instantly inflamed raw nerves in neighbourhoods that have welcomed generations of immigrants from France’s former colonies and elsewhere. Their France-born children frequently complain that they are subjected to police ID checks and harassment far more frequently than white people or those in more affluent neighbourhoods.
Anti-racism activists renewed their complaints about police behaviour in the shooting’s wake.
“We have to go beyond saying that things need to calm down,” said Dominique Sopo, head of the campaign group SOS Racisme.
“The issue here is how do we make it so that we have a police force that, when they see blacks and Arabs, don’t tend to shout at them, use racist terms against them and in some cases, shoot them in the head.”
Prache, the Nanterre prosecutor, said officers tried to stop Nahel because he looked so young and was driving a Mercedes with Polish license plates in a bus lane.
He ran a red light to avoid being stopped then got stuck in traffic. Both officers involved said they drew their guns to prevent him from fleeing.
The officer who fired a single shot said he feared he and his colleague or someone else could be hit by the car, according to Prache. The officers said they felt “threatened” as the car drove off.
Two magistrates are leading the investigation, Prache said. Under French law, which differs from the US and British legal systems, magistrates often lead investigations.
Preliminary charges mean investigating judges have strong reason to suspect wrongdoing, but they allow time for further investigation before a decision is made on whether to send the case to trial. The police officer has been placed in provisional detention, according to the prosecutor's office.
Watch BBC correspondent Rajini Vaidyanathan's update on Breakfast about France protests
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