Orleans, France: Police under fire in the district of the Argonne

translated from cette semaine

October 4, 2010 - Outbreak of violence at Argonne, September 27, 2010
Cars ram the police station and city hall during Friday and Saturday night, then hit a police car the next. A gang puts the district under pressure.
Saturday night, individuals first cut off street lighting in the Argonne district so as to act with impunity, hoping to render the video surveillance cameras useless.
At the same time, a stolen Ford Fiesta blocks Mozart square. The driver takes over a part of the pavement in the hope of projecting the vehicle against the area police station, vacant as police officers are off duty that day.
A metal barrier resists the attempted assault and thwarts the project. The Fiesta is then burned just yards from the police station which receives several jets of Molotov cocktails.
Coordinated attacks
Meanwhile, a few hundred yards from the roundabout in the Avenue des Droits-de-l’Homme, plastic blocks were burned at the exact spot where the road becomes a bottleneck because of works. The fire is "strategic" to try to delay the intervention of firefighters and police vehicles.
At the same time, a stolen Ford Mondeo nearby is thrown against the window of the local town hall before being burned, triggering alarms allowing rapid response.
Although the city refused the reinforcement of CRS riot police in order to avoid an escalation safe the night from Saturday to Sunday was not quiet. Two vehicles were burned, rue du Petit Pont, and a dozen masked youths tried to burn the EDF transformer at Clos-Gautier.
Two Ford Fiestas also tried to intimidate the police vehicles on patrol. If one of the Fiesta drove very close to the forces of order, the other bumped right into the rear of the car of the municipal police without causing major damage. No injuries were reported.
These last three weeks, police had made several arrests related to drug cases with violence and fraud.