Over 600 People Imprisoned Over France Riots So Far, 95 Per Cent Conviction Rate

The massive France-wide riots that saw thousands of cars and buildings attacked and even burnt out has led to over 1,200 convictions and 600 people sent to prison, the French government has revealed.

Swift justice in France, with 600 people convicted and in prison just two weeks after the widespread riots triggered by the shooting of an Algerian heritage teenager by a police officer at a traffic stop gone wrong, but which soon devolved into looting and violence.

Officers from the RAID (“Research, Assistance, Intervention, Deterrence”) tactical unit of the French National Police patrol the street in Lille, northern France, on June 30, 2023 (Photo by KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images)

The figures come from the French minister of justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, who revealed that 1,300 had been prosecuted, 1,278 successfully, a remarkable 95 per cent success rate. Of those, 600 people have been imprisoned, reports Le Figaro.

The minister also revealed there would be some legal repercussions against the parents of lawbreaking children, although Dupond-Moretti said this would be on a “case by case” basis and the government would not be persecuting “the mother who works at night and who raises her child alone”.

Also revealed in Dupond-Moretti’s comments are the extent to which prosecutions are being made by using evidence from youth-orientated social media app Snapchat, which sells itself on being a platform for ephemeral — which is to say, self-erasing — messages. Yet the minister warns young criminals to not rely on messages traded on the platform to not be visible to law enforcement.

He said he wanted to: “remind young people that Snapchat is not a hideout, and that [we can] ‘break the accounts’… when two kids call each other to meet up and to hit a target, you can find them”.

Police personnel detain suspects on a street in Nice, south-eastern France late July 1, 2023 (Photo by VALERY HACHE/AFP via Getty Images)

France has been forthright in its view that social media played a major role in the violence last month, with President Macron outright calling for social apps to be “cut off” during the riots with a partial internet blackout. Critics compared the French leader to the North Korean regime for his authoritarian impulse to take out access to social media, but the European elites were undeterred, with French European Commissioner Thierry Breton threatening tech giants with bans if they didn’t take down riot content.

The Macron government appears to be leaning into using citizen’s mobile phones against them. Beyond the use of Snapchat conversation histories to secure riot prosecutions, the French government is now in the late stages of passing new rules that will allow them to remotely activate the GPS, camera, and microphone of devices like phones, laptops, and even cars to monitor suspected criminals.

The plan has been attacked from the left and right, but not apparently with enough support to prevent it from passing through France’s parliament.

While reaction from the French public — with some notable exceptions — was muted during the riots, research since has shown the majority have taken an extremely dim view of the violence, which one estimate says has cost over a billion dollars to businesses alone. Polling found a strong majority at 59 per cent believe “the riots were “the consequence of the failures of our migration policy”, and 73 per cent think French citizenship should be stripped from convicted rioters.

Demonstrators clash with police after a march protesting the shooting of Nahel Photographer: Benjamin Girette/Bloomberg via Getty Images