Fewer than 160 people were arrested overnight in connection to riots that have rocked cities across France following the killing of a teenager of North African descent by a police officer, the interior ministry said on Monday.
The relative calm following five nights of heavy riots offered some relief to the government of Emmanuel Macron in its fight to regain control of the situation, just months after widespread protests over an unpopular pension reform and a year out from hosting the Olympics.
The death of Nahel, a 17-year-old with Algerian and Moroccan parents, has stoked longstanding complaints of discrimination, police violence and systemic racism among law enforcement – denied by authorities – from rights groups and within the low-income, racially mixed suburbs that ring major French cities.
Since he was shot on Tuesday, rioters have torched cars, looted stores and targeted town halls and other properties, with flashpoints in cities including Paris, Strasbourg in the east and Marseille and Nice in the south.
The Interior Ministry has poured up to 45,000 police onto the streets each night to quell the unrest, which has mostly been confined to the suburbs but occasionally erupted into clashes in tourist areas such as Paris’ Champs-Elysees avenue.
The ministry said 157 people were arrested overnight, down from over 700 arrests the night before and over 1,300 on Friday night.
Three police officers were injured, the ministry said, while 300 vehicles were damaged by fire, according to provisional figures.
The grandmother of Nahel, who was shot by police during a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, said on Sunday the rioters were using his death as an excuse to cause havoc and said the family wanted calm.
“I tell them to stop it. It’s mothers who take buses, it’s mothers who walk outside. We should calm things, we don’t want them to break things,” the woman identified on BFM TV as Nadia said. “Nahel is dead, that’s all there is.”
