The Death of the French Riots Was Greatly Exaggerated?

One eyewitness from the city of Grenoble suggests that rioting has continued, though this particular report doesn't note the car torch metric. It, however, suggests that the police used tear gas and harshly treated some in the crowds.

Meanwhile, a a teen driving a stolen car with two others drowned after being chased by police. Will this spark new rioting?

Trouble between police and disaffected youths was among causes of a three-week upsurge in violence in poor suburbs across France earlier this month. The trouble was sparked by the death of two adolescents who were electrocuted at a power substation just north of Paris apparently believing they were being pursued by police.

While officials insisted there was no link between the recent riots and Saturday's tragedy, the three youths involved are of immigrant descent and from a disadvantaged suburb, like many of the rioters.

Henri Masse, prefect for France's Drome region, told France's LCI television on Sunday that the teenager drowned after police recognised the stolen car in the town of Montelimar late on Saturday and gave chase.

In a bid to escape, the youths drove the car down a stony path that runs alongside a Rhone river canal. "In the darkness, they skidded and the car fell into a minor canal of the Rhone," Masse said.

Police saved two of the car's occupants. "Unfortunately the third one died," Masse added. The prefect is the central government's representative in the region.

Considering that the rioting began October 27 after the accidental death of two teens who hid out in a power substation, anything is possible.

The rioting has definitely reduced France's stature at home and abroad according to new polling data.

And police who battled rioters for more than three weeks are going to get bonus pay:

National police chief Michel Gaudin told a conference of police Thursday that about 22,000 officers will receive additional payments of $350 each, according to Jean-Yves Bugelli, assistant secretary general of the Alliance police union.

The three weeks of car burnings, vandalism and clashes between youths and officers erupted in impoverished suburban housing projects that are home to many immigrants and their French-born children.

The police were stretched thin - often clocking overtime hours, working frequent shifts and being asked to hold off on vacations.

That's a total of $7.7 million in extra payments. Yet, that's not the only tidbit in that article:

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, visiting the nearby town of Meaux on Friday, said it would be "a mistake" to punish the parents of delinquents without considering "the reality of their problems."

He was commenting on a measure that Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was expected to submit to the Cabinet as part of a new crime prevention bill, one of the center-right government's responses to the crisis.

The bill will draw heavily on a parliamentary report on crime prevention, which recommends among other things that the government strip "negligent" parents of some state subsidies, handing control of welfare allocations to social workers.

Holding parents responsible for the actions of their kids? Say it isn't so. I'd like to see the thugs who did the rioting held accountable. They caused widespread damage, damaged the reputation of the country, and continue to run free.

What folks should keep in mind is that when the Brits had riots in Brixton, the world media called them race riots. When riots occurred in Los Angeles (Rodney King) in 1992, the world media called them race riots. So, what does the world media call the riots in France? It isn't racial or religious related violence, despite the fact that the rioters were predominantly minorities and Muslim.

Meanwhile, lots of folks are trying to understand why the riots occurred. Some point to multiculturalism. Others, like the New York Times comment on the actual communities where the people live and blames the architecture and urban planning:

Marseille is not like most French cities, where the urban core is made up of neatly tended architectural treasures and the disorder is pushed to the periphery. It is turned inside out, so that "inner city" and "suburbia" retain their American connotations. That may have spared Marseille a lot of problems.

La crise des banlieues turns out to be an ambiguous phrase. Is there a problem in France's suburbs or with France's suburbs? For Schäuble, it's the buildings. For the boosters of Marseille, it's where you put them.

The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, as Francophobes have been more than ready to explain, bears some of the blame for both. His designs inspired many of the suburbs where the riots of October and November began. In fact, he inspired the very practice of housing the urban poor by building up instead of out. Soaring apartments, he thought, would finally give sunlight and fresh air to city laborers, who had been trapped in narrow and fetid back streets since the dawn of urbanization. But high-rise apartments mixed badly with something poor communities generate in profusion: groups of young, armed, desperate males. Anyone who could control the elevator bank (and, when that became too terrifying to use, the graffiti-covered stairwells) could hold hundreds of families ransom.

Le Corbusier called houses "machines for living." France's housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation.

Sorry, but the problems extend beyond the urban communities to the people living in those communities. The French are engaging in a social theory that doesn't demand personal responsibility and that will condemn the country to future problems.