In France, Alienation Is a Two-Way Street

Capt. Eric Peterle emerged from the fray on a recent night carrying a heavy grate about the size of his head.

An hour earlier, a rioter had torn the grate from the drain of an apartment building and hurled it at the riot squad commander. When Peterle returned to headquarters, the object in his brawny hand became evidence -- of a crime and of the nihilistic fury of France’s worst riots in decades.

Peterle’s unit first saw action in the epicenter of the unrest, the grim gangways of housing projects in Clichy-sous-Bois near Paris. Later, it redeployed about 30 miles south to this seemingly tranquil, stone-walled town where metropolitan sprawl ends in meadows. In both places, rioters bombarded the unit with rocks, bricks and Molotov cocktails -- and even shopping carts and the wreckage of a telephone booth.

“Luckily, the guy who threw this thing missed,” said Peterle, a 42-year-old with close-cropped hair and an armor-plated build forged in 17 years of close-quarters combat.

While the anti-riot officers brawled in the glare of flames and cameras, officers of the national police intelligence division led the shadow war.

In a discreet headquarters near Paris last week, rumpled and unshaven officers in jeans, sweaters and scarves worked a legion of informants. There was a barrage of tips and rumors: firebombs stockpiled in a basement, arsonists scheming hit-and-run incursions far from the riot zones, Islamic fundamentalists keeping a mysteriously low profile.

The officers consulted with mayors, businessmen, teachers, imams. Their unique knowledge of the landscape made them the brains of a battle against a guerrilla-style foe in which at least 208 officers have been injured.

In conversations during the last two weeks of violence, a dozen officers from different units, ranks and cities said they were exhausted and dismayed, but not surprised, by the nationwide rampage.

For years, the officers said, the police had warned that France’s immigrant-dominated slums were on the verge of exploding, a slow-motion riot about to fast-forward. Culture clashes and economic woes had created a lost generation of mostly Muslim youths seething with hostility toward the state. Wrong-headed ideology had caused governments to pull back from low-income housing projects, or cites, allowing parallel societies ruled by criminal and extremist networks to flourish, officers said.

And several veterans agree with critics who say that France’s rigid, paramilitary policing culture aggravated tensions between youths and officers. Even before the riots, an average of 3,500 cars a month were burned nationwide.

“We didn’t predict the hour and the day,” said a police intelligence chief, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “But it was all reported: the chasm between youths and society, the power of the criminal economy, the isolation of the projects where it is basically youths versus cops. Because there is nothing. No movie theaters, no restaurants, nothing to do. The only face of the state is the police.”

The overall violence has declined markedly from its peak, but it continued this weekend, mainly in provincial regions.

France’s police are proud of their restraint and discipline during the onslaught. They have not fired a single shot, even when shot at on half a dozen occasions. There has only been one death, a retiree beaten by a youth, and few serious injuries.

On the other hand, critics say flaws in French policing were among the fuses for the explosion. The French police excel at intelligence, investigations and crowd control, say academic experts and European and U.S. investigators. But in a hierarchical system, intelligence tends to flow up the chain of command, not to other officers in the field. And experts say police here are weaker at basic beat-cop patrolling, an area vital to the dramatic reduction of crime and unrest in U.S. cities in the last decade.

Like those in other European countries, the French system differs greatly from the city police departments of the United States. The police here are a national force led by chiefs in Paris. In the provinces, police forces answer not to mayors but to regional administrators known as prefects.

It’s routine for officers, many of whom come from small cities or towns, to start their careers in far-off regions and spend their careers trying to land a post closer to home. In keeping with the military model, Peterle’s riot division is housed in bases outside big cities and dispatched all over the country to handle unrest, demonstrations or security for major events.

For patrol officers, the dilapidated, violence-ridden housing projects in the industrial belt around Paris are often the first assignment. Rookies find themselves stuck in a harrowing job in an expensive region. They are often scared and bewildered by the mosaic of cultures in the projects: African women in colorful tribal robes, aging bearded Algerians in Islamic garb, defiant second- and third-generation youths in hip-hop regalia.

In turn, the youths often see police as unwanted representatives of a distant state, said Dominique Monjardet, a sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research.

“The urban patrol officer is not an element of the community like the shop owner, the bus driver,” Monjardet said. “For the police, all local contact is seen as potentially corrupting.... The rookies don’t know the turf. They don’t like it. They don’t know how to handle it. They have three years to spend there and they are counting the days. They are young, so it becomes youths against youths, like two gangs.”

French authorities have attempted reforms similar to those in the United States, such as “community policing” and Compstat, a results-driven management technique that Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton pioneered in New York. But the experiments have been halfhearted, Monjardet said.

In fact, many beat cops see their mission as clear-cut.

“In the media it’s always analysis, sociology,” said Cmdr. Eric Slangen, who from headquarters in Melun oversees patrol operations in a vast sector east and south of Paris. “Police have to focus on facts, because we can’t analyze causes, we aren’t there for that. We are there to see what happens and react and arrest people.... There’s a tendency to ask police to play a bigger role than the one we have.”

Often, the top brass in Paris give patrol divisions little support or direction, favoring detective units that investigate major crimes such as armed robbery, organized crime and terrorism, Monjardet said. As a result, most beat cops have few anti-crime tools beyond repeatedly stopping youths for identity checks, which leads to complaints of harassment and discrimination, he said.

But Patrice Ribeiro of the Synergie Officiers police union said that political ideology had handcuffed police during the last three decades, in effect handing over public housing to entrenched criminal networks that deal in drugs and stolen goods. The trend began with leftist governments in the 1980s and continued with rightist leaders, he said.

“For years, we had instructions not to go into the projects,” Ribeiro said. “There was an ideology that it was a provocation. So we left a lot of people with the idea that it was their turf and police weren’t supposed to intrude.... We abandoned all those people, and most of them are honest people. We abandoned them in neighborhoods that have rotted.”

Tensions rose after the center-right government wrested power from the Socialist Party in 2002 and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy ordered police to reclaim turf from gangs and Islamic extremists who had become powerful in the cites. Most officers admire Sarkozy, calling him a rare leader who is in touch with street reality.

One arm of the police knows the cites extremely well -- the domestic General Intelligence division. Descended from the political police of Napoleonic times, it has no real equivalent in the United States. In the past it spied on unions, leftists and other social groups. Today its officers conduct election analysis and keep tabs on soccer hooligans as well as casino gambling.

But in the 1970s, the mission evolved. As immigrant-dominated slums grew, intelligence officers targeted two interconnected threats: Islamic extremism and organized crime.

Their methods are a curious mix of open and covert. They use a vast network of wiretaps. They cultivate informants by offering legal favors, money, immigration papers. The information flows fast -- on Fridays, commanders in one big city have on their desk by afternoon the content of sermons from noon prayers at every known mosque in their region.

At the same time, the chiefs do not conceal their identities. They develop close relationships with leaders of political, business, religious and ethnic groups, an approach similar to community policing. The analysis of the intelligence division was key in deployments against the unrest, guiding riot police who were often sent into areas they did not know.

“I think that’s one reason the riots have lasted so long,” Monjardet said. “These little kids know the turf better than the police. In an urban guerrilla situation, a ponderous police like ours has trouble reacting. You have to be fast, mobile, flexible.”

The arson assault by loosely organized gangs displayed remarkable speed and mobility. Communication via the Internet, television and cellphones spread the chaos even into rural areas.

Surveying the future beyond a landscape full of wreckage, police worry about a new “riot generation” that knows it has set a dangerous precedent.

“The other night I was in a little town nearby of 10,000 residents,” said Slangen, the patrol commander here. “About 1 a.m. they set fire to a container just above a gas main. It could have been a dramatic explosion. And there’s no huge problem in that town. No housing project. Just a few delinquents....

“They are communicating with other areas about targets. What do we fear now? That they’ll start attacking downtowns.”