The sequence started on July 14, the day of the National Holiday in France. Almost 400 people were arrested throughout the country by nightly altercations within the framework of the celebrations. Many were minors. After that day, violent episodes in several cities have occurred, especially in the south, burning cars and clashes with the police. In Béziers, a city of 80,000 inhabitants near the southern city of Montpellier, an agent was seriously injured the night of July 20 when, after being alerted to a fire, the agents arrived at the scene and found half a hundred individuals armed with pyrotechnic material.
In Limoges, in the southwest, the ambush was repeated, in the same week, with nine injured agents. The Government displayed the riot and more than a dozen cities and municipalities have decreed these days the curfew for minors, so that they cannot go out at night if it is not accompanied by their parents or an authorized adult (brother or tutor). Many have expanded the ban throughout the summer.
The objective is to prevent the episodes of violence that have been repeated for weeks and that Interior Minister Bruno Retilleau attributes to the “urban guerrillas.” “Before there was a truce in summer, but now less.
This prohibition of circular at night extends to several cities throughout the territory, such as Nîmes or Béziers (southern country), Compiègne (north), Limoges (Southwest) or the municipalities of Villecresnes, Vitry Chatillon, Triel-Su-Seine and Saint-Euen Sur Seine, in the Parisian region. The age range goes from 13 to 17 and the schedule sections are from 22.00 or 23.00 to 6.00. Normally, the most problematic neighborhoods are limited and can not extend more than six months. The measure, explains Rudy Mana, police and spokesman of the Amicale Association of the National Police, “allows the agents to request the documentation to the minor, although it is not committing an infraction”, and see if, for example, it carries some kind of weapon.
At the end of June, the so -called Attal Law (adopts the name of former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal) was promulgated, which, among other measures, facilitates mayors the possibility of decreeing this prohibition. In a circular sent to the local authorities, the head of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, encouraged to “establish a curfew since classes end.” “This measure will be privileged in a prevention logic, especially within the framework of the fight against the possession of white weapons by minors.”
The matter divides. There are mayors who consider that the minor is stigmatized and doubt their effectiveness. “The restriction is not new, but it has been applied in contexts of violence,” explains Olivia Sarton, lawyer and director of jurists for childhood, who watches over the rights of minors. “The mayors have this power to issue curfew decrees since the 2000s. It has been used when there have been disturbances, and now more and more preventively.”
The municipalities need the authorization of the Prefecture, the corresponding government delegation. “It is a restriction of freedoms, so they have to justify that there has been an increase in crime and that the measure is provided. The police ensure their execution, but always under the control of an administrative court,” Matizes Sarton, recalls that “it is about preventing minors from committing crimes, but also to protect them and prevent them from being victims.”
In some cities, this violence is linked to drug trafficking, although in other cases mayors want to avoid acts of vandalism or robberies in an summer period in which surveillance is relaxed. Saint-Ouen, a municipality of 60,000 inhabitants located north of Paris, decreed a week ago the remaining touch to children under 16 years after 23.30 because, according to its mayor, Karim Bouamrane, “from that time the place where they have to be at home.”
Bouaumrane, of the Socialist Party, is the first mayor of lefts to apply this measure, more frequent in municipalities governed by right -wing formations. “There are two ideologies in this regard. The one that some defend is that young people are at the origin of insecurity, which are the problem. I believe in the other, that they are the solution and that we must invest in education and prevention,” he explains.
Therefore, it has expanded the schedule of the municipality’s youth center until 23.00, at which time the minors return to their homes. “That way, now that there are no classes and many parents relax surveillance, they are not on the street. The little ones accompany them home,” explains Ryan Chaikh, one of those responsible for the social center. He considers that the measure is effective because, in the case of Saint-Ouen, “in reality the episodes of violence do not occur in summer, but during the winter.”
40% of the inhabitants are under 35 years old and, according to the mayor, “it is the families themselves who ask for it, so we give them a legal framework to educate.” In the document sent to the Prefecture to obtain authorization, it is justified that the rate of crimes per inhabitant is 19 per 1,000, above the national average, and also that there is an increase in crime of 8%.
The increase in violence and the use of weapons among children increasingly worries the government. In May they began to make random records in schools to prevent minors from entering class with knives in backpacks. The measure was approved after the death in April of a teenager stabbed by a partner in an Institute of Nantes. A month earlier, it was another minor, 17, who died after being stabbed at the exit of school in the department of Essone.
“It has been normalized that the kids go out with a knife in their pocket. Sometimes they take it to defend themselves, but adolescence is an age of transgression and if they have a problem they use it,” says the lawyer Sarton, who admits that so far this year the number of minors involved in crimes has increased and “they are getting younger and younger, below the age of 13.”
According to the latest available data from the Ministry of Justice, in 2023, 179,100 minors ended an open file in the courts for crimes such as drug trafficking, theft, vandalism, possession of weapons or sexual violence. It is 3% of the population between 10 and 17 years. From this figure, 48,300, 7% more than in 2022, and 29,700 were condemned.
The curfew for minors was generally decreed in the 2005 disturbances, originated after the death of two adolescents aged 15 and 17, who were electrocuted while fleeing the police in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris. They lasted two weeks and there were 4,700 detainees. It also extended in the revolts of July 2023, after the death of a 17 -year -old teenager for the shot of a policeman in a traffic control in Nanterre, in the Banlieue Parisian There were more than 3,500 detainees in a week.
The feeling of injustice and suspicion towards the forces of the order that motivated those disturbances endures in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, where the episodes of violence follow each other, not with such intensity, but often. Summer is a specially problematic period. Béziers has applied the measure for several years and the Nice tourist decreed it last summer.
“It can be a dissuasive measure in some cases, because the agents are obliged to take the minor to the police station, identify it and call their parents to look for them,” explains agent Mana. However, in other cases it does not achieve that deterrent effect, it clarifies: “Many disregard and the police are forced to take the offender to their home. It is a supplementary effort, because with the same troops there is an extra mission.” The fine, 35 euros, “neither dissuits much,” he adds.
The Ministry of Interior does not have a count of the number of municipalities with curfew because, the authorities justify, the order passes through the different prefectures. According to their figures on crime at the end of 2024, children between 13 and 17 years were responsible for 31% of the robberies with a weapon that were committed throughout the period, 35% of the robberies without weapon and 28% of vehicle subtractions. 25% of those arrested for crimes of sexual violence in 2024 were minors.
For more updates, visit our homepage: NewsTimesWire
