French mayor seeks drone use amid post-riot cleanup

In Neuilly-sur-Marne, a poverty-stricken region east of Paris, the mayor, Zartoshte Bakhtiari, revealed just how challenging the violent riots have been in France over the past week. Since the outbreak of clashes, he has barely managed to catch three hours of sleep each night. His days are consumed by his mayoral responsibilities while his nights are filled with patrol duties, often accompanied by his staff and city councillors until the early hours, between 4am and 5am.

He said…

“Within days, we were in hell.”

The mayor is scheduled to attend a meeting at the Élysée Palace with President Emmanuel Macron, alongside scores of his fellow mayors across the nation, to address the crisis. His appeal in this meeting is straightforward – he desires both increased strictness from the state and sanction for their local city police to utilise drones for monitoring their town activities.

Bakhtiari criticises the approach and attitudes of politicians over the past many years.

“What’s happening now is the result of years of weakness from politicians, and decisions that have not been taken. It’s a problem of authority because these rioters don’t fear justice. They may go to court, but they come back home a few hours after trial simply because we don’t have enough places in jail in this district of Paris. We cannot support this kind of weakness from the state.”

Adjacent to his office, the Bakhtiari points out a charred local city police station wall. He reveals how the rioters managed to breach the wall at 1am with a petrol-filled jerrycan which marked the beginning of the station’s decimation. Seven burnt squad cars are a sad reminder of the attack as they lay lifelessly beneath the scorched facade of the building initially shared with the public housing department.

The building was tasked to provide housing to over two thousand local individuals, but its interior now resembles a hollow shell, charred and coated with the remnants of melted plastic and ash. Several important records have been irreversibly lost to the fire.

The head of the housing department, Laurence Tendron Brunet, on seeing the aftermath, is deeply distressed, “I’m so sad. We’re going to rebuild, we’re going to start again. But right now there are people who are so desperate for housing. I know about half of them – when they call, I recognise their voices. They’re not files, they’re human beings”

The arsonists managed to get caught on surveillance camera footage, and it appears as though the culprits might be adolescents, aged between 14-16 years. Bakhtiari struggles to understand how these children have resorted to vandalism, lamenting that parental control should ideally have restrained them.

A place called Les Fauvettes, in Neuilly-sur-Marne, is among the worst-affected regions post the riots. Public facilities such as the library, the shops, and a supermarket have all been torched. Interestingly, many of the same rioters also reside in Les Fauvettes.

Aicha, a 23 year old teaching assistant, confirms the resentment simmering among the young. She tells of their intolerance of being subjugated repetitively…

“They’re fed up. It always falls on the same people. If you’re black or Arab, a gun is pulled and shots fired without thinking. When it’s a white person, they think twice before shooting or even giving a fine.”

But Mayor Bakhtiari refutes any claims that there’s an issue with the country’s law enforcement. He said…

“Absolutely not, I cannot hear that kind of argument. Maybe we have people in the police who are racist, but we cannot say the police [itself] is racist. The police behave very well here in France.”

However, individual incidents such as the one where an officer was charged with voluntarily causing the death of a 17 year old named Nahel Merzouk, only tell half of the issue.

The other half comprises the partition these occurrences have inevitably led to within France itself. A public collection in support of the accused officer’s family managed to accumulate more than a million euros recently, far surpassing the collection for Merzouk’s family.