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France police shooting: Keep your teenagers indoors, Macron urges parents

French President, Emmanuel Macron has pleaded with parents to keep their teenagers at home to stop riots from spreading throughout France.

Violent protests have broken out across France after a 17-year-old was shot by police on Tuesday during a traffic check in the Paris district of Nanterre.

Following this, people protested in the streets by torching vehicles and hurling pyrotechnics and stones.

The French president has asked parents to keep their children away from the riots, noting that some of those participating were “very young”.

He added that social media had “intoxicated” some children and encouraged copycat behaviour.

Speaking after a second government crisis meeting, the president said the violence was being organised online.

Commenting on the young people involved, he said: “We sometimes have the feeling that some of them are living in the streets of the video games that have intoxicated them.”

He urged parents to keep teenagers at home to quell rioting, saying many of those arrested are young. “It is the parent’s responsibility to keep them at home, and therefore it is important for everyone’s peace of mind that parental responsibility can be fully exercised,” he said.

In a brief statement, Macron criticised the “unacceptable exploitation of the adolescent’s death” and said that Nahel’s death had been deliberately planned.

He said he wants social media such as Snapchat and TikTok to remove sensitive content and said that violence is being organized online.

He did not announce a state of emergency but outlined a series of measures to try to quell the recent violence.

Protesters erected barricades, lit fires and shot fireworks at police who responded with tear gas and water cannons in French streets overnight as tensions grew over the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old that has shocked the nation.

More than 600 people were arrested and at least 200 police officers were injured as the government struggled to restore order on a third night of unrest.

Armored police vehicles rammed through the charred remains of cars that had been flipped and set ablaze in the northwestern Paris suburb of Nanterre, where a police officer shot the teen identified only by his first name, Nahel. On the other side of Paris, protesters lit a fire at the city hall of the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois and set a bus depot ablaze in Aubervilliers.

Some 40,000 police officers were deployed to quell the protests. Police detained 667 people, the interior minister said; 307 of those were in the Paris region alone, according to the Paris police headquarters.
A national police official said that 200 police officers were hurt. There was no information on injuries among the general populace.

The government refrained from issuing a state of emergency, a move used to put an end to weeks of rioting across France in the wake of the unintentional deaths of two boys running from the police in 2005.

The police officer accused of pulling the trigger Tuesday was handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide after prosecutor Pascal Prache said his initial investigation led him to conclude “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met.”

Preliminary charges mean investigating magistrates strongly suspect wrongdoing but need to investigate more before sending a case to trial.

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