France unrest: 40,000 police personnel will be deployed to quell violence that followed deadly police shooting

France’s Interior Minister said Thursday that 40,000 police personnel will be deployed overnight to quell the rioting that has seized cities and villages in the aftermath of a tragic police shooting.

According to ministries, scores of police personnel have been injured. Éric Dupond-Moretti, the Justice Minister, stated that 130 police officers were injured following the violence after the police shooting of a 17-year-old boy.

“All this has to stop,” the minister declared. He gave no details about the types and seriousness of the injuries.

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, who oversees the police, later gave a higher figure of 170 injured.

He said none of the injuries were life-threatening.

A hundred and fifty people were arrested in France after a second night of unrest across the country, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Thursday, following the fatal shooting by police of a 17-year-old boy during a traffic stop.

The ministry said dozens of police officers were injured during the clashes.

“A night of unbearable violence against symbols of the Republic: town halls, schools and police stations put ablaze or attacked. 150 arrests,” Darmanin said on his Twitter account.

Police made 150 arrests nationwide during a second night of unrest, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said, as public anger spilled out onto the streets, notably in the ethnically diverse suburbs of France’s big cities.

The epicentre of the unrest was in Nanterre, a working class town on the western outskirts of Paris where the shooting of the 17-year-old boy identified as Nahel took place.

“The last few hours have been marked by scenes of violence against police stations but also schools and town halls, and thus institutions of the Republic and these scenes are wholly unjustifiable,” Macron said as he opened the emergency meeting.

The fatal shooting has fed into longstanding complaints of police violence from within the low-income, racially mixed suburbs that ring major cities in France.

A video shared on social media, verified by Reuters, shows two police officers beside a car, a Mercedes AMG, with one shooting at the teenage driver at close range as he pulls away. He died shortly afterwards from his wounds, the local prosecutor said.

The interior ministry had said Wednesday on that 2,000 police had been mobilised in the Paris region. Shortly before midnight on Nanterre’s Avenue Pablo Picasso, a trail of overturned vehicles burned as fireworks fizzed at police lines.

Police also clashed with protesters in the northern city of Lille and in Toulouse in the southwest, and there was unrest in Amiens, Dijon as well as in numerous districts throughout the greater Paris region, the authorities said.

A police officer is being investigated for voluntary homicide for shooting the youth. Prosecutors say the boy failed to comply with an order to stop his car.

Rights groups allege systemic racism inside law enforcement agencies in France, a charge Macron has previously denied.

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