French government officials have promised to get tough on crime after a video of a Paris policewoman on the ground getting repeatedly kicked by a mob in the early hours of New Year’s Day went viral. The incident occurred in the Paris suburb of Champigny-sur-Marne where cops were called to a party that allegedly had gotten out of control.
A male officer on the scene was also attacked and suffered a broken nose in the melee. Both suffered concussions. The suspects disappeared into a local housing project and are still at large. The assembled crowd also flipped over a police cruiser. Cops deployed tear gas in the encounter.
In response to the incident which has outraged the French public when cell phone footage went viral on social media, President Emmanuel Macron expressed these sentiments, the Daily Mail reported.
“Those guilty of the cowardly and criminal lynching of police doing their duty on the night of December 31st will be found and punished. Force will support the law. Honor to the police and full support to all the agents attacked in such a low-level fashion.”
In something along the lines of an annual tradition, New Year’s Eve in Paris saw about 1,000-plus cars torched by young wrongdoers.
Gerard Collomb, France’s interior minister, which is roughly equivalent to the U.S. Homeland Security secretary, described the attacks as unacceptable and said that the violence must be stopped, France24 explained. He also likened the attacks on the cops as an act of aggression against the French Republic itself. He added that authorities will implement changes in how low-income neighborhoods, which have a large immigrant population, will be policed.
President Macron is also planning to launch new social programs in those areas, France 24 added.
“Macron set out a raft of policies to fight poverty in downtrodden districts in November after critics labelled him a ‘president of the rich’ due to his generous tax cuts for high earners. He reached out to the poor again in his New Year’s message, promising a ‘grand social project’ in 2018.”
National Front Leader Marine Le Pen , who finished a distant second to Macron in the presidential runoff election in May 2017 and ran on a law-and-order platform, “demanded a reform to allow police to greater use of ‘legitimate defense’ to respond to such attacks,” The Local.fr reported .
