In France, More Unrest for the Weary

As the anniversary of last fall’s nationwide riots nears, the violence and tension still simmering in immigrant neighborhoods caused a political uproar Friday, with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy again in the thick of the crossfire.

In a brazen incident Tuesday night, a gang ambushed a police captain and another officer and severely beat them. The same day, a leaked law enforcement memo warned about “a climate of impunity” in Seine-Saint-Denis, the area just north of Paris where the riots began.

In response, Sarkozy declared that juvenile court judges in the area systematically let young offenders walk free. The resulting complaints about Sarkozy from the judiciary, the leftist opposition and enemies in his own center-right coalition were swift and loud.

President Jacques Chirac took the unusual step Friday of meeting with a high court justice who complained that Sarkozy had infringed on the autonomy of France’s judges. Chirac’s statement afterward did not mention names, but it seemed clearly directed at Sarkozy, his longtime intraparty nemesis and a top presidential contender.

“The chief of state reiterates the great need for respecting the independence of magistrates and the necessary serenity that should dictate the exercise of their mission,” the statement said.

Chirac also had taken an indirect verbal swipe at Sarkozy after a U.S. trip last week in which the interior minister met with President Bush and criticized France’s high-profile opposition to the Iraq war in 2003. Sarkozy, who plans to run for president next spring, portrays himself as a pragmatic reformer intent on breaking with a stodgy political establishment.

He stuck to his guns Friday, convinced that the voters agree with his call for stronger punishment of violent youths.

“I never criticized all judges,” he said in a radio interview. “But how am I supposed to ensure the security of the French, and especially the French in Seine-Saint-Denis, if I find myself with a penal system in which the police keep arresting the same people and the judicial response is not at the level of the police response? No one can deny what I say.”

The tension seemed inevitable because of gathering political tensions as well as the potential for a revival of street mayhem that police have worried about for months. Although Sarkozy is popular largely because of his image as a crime fighter, his hard-charging style also makes him vulnerable and volatile. Last fall, his name became a rallying cry for rampaging youths, most of them of immigrant descent, during France’s worst outbreak of arson and destruction in decades.

Despite efforts to flood the slums with police, resources and social programs, the anniversary of the riots that began Oct. 27 could be delicate, officials said.

“In our middle-class, media-driven society, which systematically commemorates anniversaries, there’s always the possibility that youths will try to mark the date in a macabre way,” said a veteran police intelligence chief who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the volatility of the situation. “They are aware of that psychology. There is a real hatred of Sarkozy. And of the police.”

Police concerns were underscored by the attack Tuesday night in a low-income housing project in Corbeil-Essonnes south of the capital. The uniformed captain of a riot squad and his driver were riding in an unmarked car shortly before 10 p.m. when they stopped to chase youths who had thrown stones at them, officials said.

The stone-throwers were apparently bait: About 20 masked assailants emerged from hiding and beat the officers bloody. The captain lost two teeth, underwent facial surgery and could be left with impaired vision, officials said.

The ambush was startling even by the standards of the running duel between police and youths. Street gangs despise the burly, disciplined officers of the elite riot units, known as the Compagnies Republicaines de Securite, or CRS, as mortal enemies, but they rarely engage in hand-to-hand combat with them. To beef up police presence, CRS units have remained on patrol since the riots rather than returning to their barracks as usual, officials said.

“It doesn’t seem as if there was a particular motive of vengeance, they just wanted to thump a cop,” said Bruno Pommard, a retired SWAT officer who directs a nonprofit agency for children in Corbeil-Essonnes and other areas. “These gangs are unpredictable.”

The ambush reflected a larger concern among veteran police commanders that the riots had unleashed a new aggressiveness among teenagers. That was the gist of an internal law enforcement memo published Tuesday by Le Monde newspaper.

The memo cited a 13% rise in crime in Seine-Saint-Denis, an area of 1.5 million people on the industrial northern periphery of the capital, since the riots. Violence has overwhelmed and demoralized the young, inexperienced police commanders who are routinely assigned to dangerous districts, wrote Prefect Jean-Francois Cordet, the area’s top law enforcement official. His memo warned that young criminals were vulnerable to increasingly prominent Islamic extremists who accumulate power by establishing themselves as mediators between authorities and youths.

Cordet said he and many mayors in the area blame juvenile court judges whom they consider irresponsibly lax. Noting that only one of 85 juveniles arrested during last year’s riots was jailed, the memo asserted that the daily proportion was similar at the overworked courthouse in Bobigny, part of the Seine-Saint-Denis area.

“The increasingly frequent fact that a police officer encounters on the street at night a minor arrested in the morning for a burglary or violent robbery perfectly explains the situation of the area and, what’s more, the general sentiment of impunity that predominates among young criminals and the lassitude of the police whatever their rank,” the memo said.

Sarkozy reiterated that argument Wednesday, on the steps of the Bobigny courthouse, and in subsequent days. His critics accused him of ducking blame for the failure of a much-touted, high-profile policing campaign to impose control in the hostile housing projects. They said the low rates of incarceration for rioters were partly because it was hard for police to gather solid evidence in the chaos.

But his supporters say he has identified a central problem in a juvenile justice system that lags behind the times. “He simply said out loud what everybody thinks to themselves,” said Eric Woerth, a parliamentary deputy. “It’s time to open a debate about the sense of impunity that never stops growing in our slums.”

rotella@latimes.com