the French police unions have a lot to say about the current riots

In case you've somehow missed this, there's a huge amount of rioting happening all over France. A 17-year-old youth named Nahel (or Nael) Merzouk was killed by police following a car chase and traffic stop. During the traffic stop, Merzouk refused to comply with police and attempted to accelerate away, at which point he was shot in the chest by one officer. Merzouk turned out to have had a long rap sheet (to its credit, and to my surprise, Wikipedia contains a review of Merzouk's many run-ins with the law), a fact being downplayed by the left-leaning press. The American press has been calling this France's "George Floyd moment" despite there being some major disanalogies.

Over at Instapundit, a commenter slaps up a communiqué by the French police unions regarding how to react to the current riots. To use current parlance, the language in the communiqué is spicy. Here is an image of a tweet by someone named Arnaud Bertrand, who provides both a translation and an image of the original communiqué.

A mostly decent translation, but "In the face of such exactions" could be more naturally translated as "In the face of such abuse." The paragraph at the end beginning with "For these reasons" (Pour ces raisons) is a bit confusingly translated, too. I'll see if I can untangle it. Watch this space.

I see some news organizations are focusing on the use of the term nuisibles ("pests") to describe the rioters. Which, of course, the journalists would focus on, instead of on the riots themselves and the millions of dollars of damage being caused by them.

Les journalistes sont tous pareils...

President Macron, meanwhile, is trying to blame video games for the violence, to the point of calling for greater restrictions on gaming. How tone-deaf can you be?

Anti-immigration, Euroskeptic political parties are doubtless watching all of this with interest.

UPDATE: in reading some leftist French-language articles, my best impression of that paragraph in the communiqué is that the police union is expressing the idea that it will freely act without support from the national government—something of a Judge Dredd situation, with the police as judge, jury, and executioner on a local level. Note that, at the beginning of the communiqué, the agenda is laid out: order must be imposed. I agree in principle that authorities need to put their collective foot down in this instance, but the problem is that France (like other Western countries) has let the problem get too out of hand over the past few decades, which makes a certain level of violence nearly inevitable. American Muslims have arguably done a better job, I think, of integrating with the larger pluralistic society, but non-integration has been a huge, festering, metastasizing problem in France for a long time. La banlieue (literally, "the suburbs," but in reality "the projects"), the region ringing Paris, is full of "no-go zones" where the police dare not enter. These no-go zones are full of violence and chaos, and they represent the accretion of generations of Muslim immigrants who refuse to integrate with the rest of French society. Are there Gallicized Muslims in France? Well, of course! But they are most decidedly the minority.

I'm reminded of gorgeous actress Golshifteh Farahani, Iranian-born and a French citizen, who is essentially living in exile for having Westernized—even to the point of doing that quintessentially French thing: nude photo shoots. Farahani is Muslim. I have no clue how she sees the current situation (i.e., the riots following Merzouk's death), but in terms of her own identity, I'm sure she sees herself as both French and Iranian, and she's certainly made efforts to integrate with French society and culture.

Where does France go from here? Well, at this point, France has survived plenty of riots, and the majority non-Muslim population has proven that it will tolerate plenty of social problems without suddenly going postal. This toleration could lead to something people have been warning about for years: the eventual erasure of French culture.