French protesters erected barricades, lit fires and shot fireworks at police in the streets of some French cities early Friday morning as tensions mounted over the deadly police shooting of a 17-year-old that has shocked the nation. Armored police vehicles rammed through the charred remains of cars that had been flipped and set ablaze in the northwestern Paris suburb of Nanterre, where a police officer shot the teen who is only being identified by his first name, Nahel. On the other side of Paris, protesters lit a fire at the city hall of the suburb of Clichy-Sous-Bois. In the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, police sought to disperse violent groups in the city center, regional authorities said. Tens of thousands of police officers have been deployed to quell the protests, which have gripped the country three nights in a row. On Thursday, 100 people had been arrested by midnight, according to a national police spokesperson. The number was expected to rise as arrests underway were being tallied. The police officer accused of pulling the trigger Tuesday was handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide after prosecutor Pascal Prache said his initial investigation led him to conclude “the conditions for the legal use of the weapon were not met.” For more on the fiery protests gripping France in the wake of the deadly police shooting, FRANCE 24’s François Picard is joined by Dr. Crystal Fleming, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. Dr. Fleming asserts that the deadly police shooting of 17-year-old Nahel reflects an “on-going history of racism at play, which is rooted in colonial violence. We’ve also seen, not just in the US and in France, but across the world, police officers lying and the media misrepresenting those lies as truth.” Yet this time we see “those lies actually refuted by camera phone evidence.”
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