What Passes For Calm

372 cars were torched in France over New Year's. Reuters (HT: ORD Neighbor) reports that the government considers this to be calm. Are you kidding me? Hundreds of cars get torched, and government officials write it off as being a calm evening?

Vandals torched 372 cars as France celebrated the New Year, down on the figure last year after a night the police described as "relatively calm."

Cars are burned fairly regularly in France and the image of vehicles in flames in poor suburbs became symbolic of riots in 2005 when angry youths set fire to thousands of cars.

There is usually an increase in the number of cars torched on New Year's Eve compared to other days of the year.

"The night was relatively calm, without notable incident, there were very few direct clashes with the security forces," said a spokesman for the national police.

At 12:00 a.m. EST, the Interior Ministry said 372 vehicles had been burned -- 144 in the Paris region and 228 in the rest of France. That was down from 397 last New Year's Eve.

There were scattered incidents with police, but that gets short shrift.

Reuters dutifully notes the 2006 riots, but it gets key information wrong. As many as 1,400 cars were torched in a single night, but in the three weeks of rioting, nearly 10,000 cars were barbequed, and several hundred businesses went up in smoke. The French have taken a laissez faire approach to the vandalism and car torchings, and the repercussions from this are long lasting.