Crowd sets police car alight at law enforcement rally in Paris
Latest update : 2016-05-18
A uncommon rally of police officers against “anti-cop hatred” in France descended into violence Wednesday as counter-demonstrators coerced two policemen out of a car and torched it.
Police were demonstrating across France against violence suffered at the palms of anti-government protesters in latest months.
France has been gripped by a wave of furious protests and strikes against reforms proposed by the deeply unpopular government of President Francois Hollande, many of which have erupted into violence.
Police say their resources are riskily spread as they oversee stepped-up security measures following last year’s Islamist attacks and attempt to ensure safety at increasingly violent protests.
And Wednesday’s police demo also turned violent as protesters smashed a police vehicle with metal bars, forcing the two officers inwards to flee the car, before hurling a petrol bomb into it, an AFP journalist reported.
Prosecutors have opened an investigation for attempted murder.
The attack came as some three hundred people defied a ban to march through the streets chanting “Cops, pigs, killers!” Police compelled the demonstrators back with volleys of rip gas.
The march took place in the capital’s Place de la Republique, the focal point for the youth-driven “Up All Night” movement that sprang from the protests against the Socialist government’s controversial reforms.
Officials had banned the counter-demonstration over concerns it would “fuel tensions and gravely menace public order”.
Public support for the police soared after last year’s jihadist attacks in Paris, and generally remains high.
Despite the tensions, the French police still scored an enviable 82-percent approval rating in a latest opinion poll.
But relations have frayed following months of the near-weekly anti-government protests, which have increasingly strained police resources at a time of unprecedented security threats and taut budgets.
The state of emergency imposed after the November terror attacks that killed one hundred thirty people has also placed extra requests on the security compels, which have themselves come under fire for using undue force.
But Alexandre Langlois, head of the police section of the CGT union, said the police’s reputation had been “wiped” and officers had become “scapegoats for social anger”.
Hollande sent a “clear message of support to all police coerces during a difficult time,” his spokesman said, adding: “A balance must be flawlessly preserved inbetween maintaining order and respecting our rights.”
Prime Minister Manuel Valls tweeted that to attack the police “is to attack all of us”.
Security was exceptionally taut for the Paris demonstration, with some four hundred police manning barriers around the square while a few hundred attended the rally.
A five-minute movie displayed clips of past demonstrations where protesters hurled petrol bombs, chunks of concrete and bottles at police.
Over the past two months, some three hundred fifty members of the security coerces have been injured during protests against the proposed labour reforms, which were compelled through the lower house of parliament last week without a vote.
A plainclothes officer was earnestly injured after being hit in the head by a projectile at a Paris protest last month.
“You can see why these security coerces are a bit exasperated,” national police chief Jean-Marc Falcone said Wednesday.
Antoine, 31, one of the officers at the Paris rally, stressed how hard it was to police the latest demonstrations.
“Everything’s a bit chaotic and you’re put right in the middle of it. You have trouble sometimes knowing who’s who, and people blame you.
“They have a go at you physically, they throw Molotov cocktails at you, stones,” things that can could injure or even kill officers, he added.
Violence at the anti-government protests have often been instigated by puny groups of masked youths — known as “casseurs” — evidently well organised and determined to clash with police.
Fuelling anti-police sentiment was a movie widely collective on social media in March displaying two officers holding up a 15-year-old boy while another punched him.
Around thirty investigations have been opened into alleged police ferocity, and left-wing politicians as well as unions have strongly criticised the government for its treating of the protests.
The police have called on the government to react stiffly to the masked “casseurs” — literally breakers, or troublemakers — at protests.