Ahead of what is poised to be the third night of race riots in the multicultural Parisian suburb of Nanterre—unrest initially sparked following an incident that saw a 17-year-old Arab youth shot dead by police at a traffic stop gone wrong—40,000 police and gendarmes will be deployed to the area to quell the increasingly out-of-control violence.
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin made the announcement after an emergency meeting on the morning of June 29th, telling journalists in Mons-en-Baroeul, a suburb of the northern city of Lille, that “the disorder professionals must go home.” Darmanin said that although Macron’s government has not yet declared a state of emergency as was done during the riots of 2005, he pledged that the “state’s response will be extremely firm.”
The planned number of law enforcement officers is “four times greater” than the numbers deployed overnight from Wednesday to Thursday, when 9,000 law enforcement officers were dispatched to address the violence, including 2,000 in the “Parisian region,” the interior minister added.
While the French state seeks to swiftly bring the violence—which has so far witnessed large groups of marauding youths torch hundreds of vehicles, loot businesses, and attack police offers—to a conclusion, the country’s far-left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, appears to be throwing gasoline on the fire.
Speaking to CNews on the evening of Wednesday, June 28th, Mélenchon expressed his deep disdain for the police, mocking them as “guard dogs calling for calm.” “As for me,” he continued, “I’m not calling for calm, I’m calling for justice,” adding that it is “the police who need to calm down.”
In a tweet, the far-left leader went even further, suggesting that the “murderous police and his accomplice who ordered him to shoot” should be hung.
Meanwhile, as of early Thursday evening, with the sun still up, images and videos of rioting youths attacking police and setting cars alight have already begun appearing on social networks.
