Police clampdown ends Paris riots

Huge numbers of riot police have restored calm to the troubled suburbs of northern Paris, with only scattered cases of arson reported today after four nights of rioting.

A few vehicles and dustbins were set on fire overnight in the Val d’Oise region north of the capital, and police made less than 10 arrests.

There were no attacks targeting police and no police injuries, a spokeswoman said.

“It really is getting calmer and calmer, we are returning little by little to normal,” she said.

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government deployed riot officers to the worst-hit town, Villiers-le-Bel, again last night, after he promised tough action against rioters who fired at police with shotguns earlier in the week. He said they would be prosecuted for attempted murder.

The trigger for the riots was the deaths on Sunday of two teenage boys in a motorbike crash with a police car in Villiers-le-Bel. Some residents refused to believe it was an accident, blaming the police.

Violence peaked on Monday night and echoed riots that raged through poor suburbs across the country for three weeks in 2005. The unrest showed that anger still simmers in poor housing projects where many Arabs, blacks and other minorities live, often isolated from mainstream society.

Successive governments have struggled with the question of how to integrate minority youths from poor districts. Heavy state investment has done little to improve housing and create jobs in the depressed projects that ring Paris.

The government’s newest plan – an “equal opportunities” bill to improve the prospects of those in poor suburbs – will be unveiled Jan. 22.