Young rioters clashed with police and looted stores Friday in a fourth day of violence in France triggered by the deadly police shooting of a teen, piling more pressure on President Emmanuel Macron after he appealed to parents to keep children off the streets and blamed social media for fueling unrest.
Police said 270 people had been arrested by midnight nationwide. Despite repeated government appeals for calm and stiffer policing, Friday saw brazen daylight violence, too.
An Apple store was looted in the eastern city of Strasbourg, where police fired tear gas, and the windows of a fast-food outlet were smashed in a Paris-area shopping mall, where officers repelled people trying to break into a shuttered store, authorities said.
In the face of the escalating crisis that hundreds of arrests and massive police deployments have failed to quell, Macron held off on declaring a state of emergency, an option that was used in similar circumstances in 2005.
Instead, his government ratcheted up its law enforcement response.
Already massively beefed-up police forces were boosted by another 5-thousand officers for Friday night, increasing the number to 45-thousand overall, the interior minister said. Some were called back from vacation.
The minister, Gerald Darmanin, said police made 917 arrests on Thursday alone and noted their young age — 17 on average.
He said more than 300 police officers and firefighters have been injured.