Who will risk a screwdriver in the liver to safeguard the parking meters of Paris for an hour?

Asked Theodore Dalrymple in his article The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris in the autumn of 2002, which in retrospect seems strangely prophetic:

But there is another growing, and much less reassuring, side to France. I go to Paris about four times a year and thus have a sense of the evolving preoccupations of the French middle classes. A few years ago it was schools: the much vaunted French educational system was falling apart; illiteracy was rising; children were leaving school as ignorant as they entered, and much worse-behaved. For the last couple of years, though, it has been crime: l’insécurité, les violences urbaines, les incivilités. Everyone has a tale to tell, and no dinner party is complete without a horrifying story. Every crime, one senses, means a vote for Le Pen or whoever replaces him.

I first saw l’insécurité for myself about eight months ago. It was just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain, in a neighborhood where a tolerably spacious apartment would cost $1 million. Three youths—Rumanians—were attempting quite openly to break into a parking meter with large screwdrivers to steal the coins. It was four o’clock in the afternoon; the sidewalks were crowded, and the nearby cafés were full. The youths behaved as if they were simply pursuing a normal and legitimate activity, with nothing to fear.

Eventually, two women in their sixties told them to stop. The youths, laughing until then, turned murderously angry, insulted the women, and brandished their screwdrivers. The women retreated, and the youths resumed their “work.”

A man of about 70 then told them to stop. They berated him still more threateningly, one of them holding a screwdriver as if to stab him in the stomach. I moved forward to help the man, but the youths, still shouting abuse and genuinely outraged at being interrupted in the pursuit of their livelihood, decided to run off. But it all could have ended very differently.

Several things struck me about the incident: the youths’ sense of invulnerability in broad daylight; the indifference to their behavior of large numbers of people who would never dream of behaving in the same way; that only the elderly tried to do anything about the situation, though physically least suited to do so. Could it be that only they had a view of right and wrong clear enough to wish to intervene? That everyone younger than they thought something like: “Refugees . . . hard life . . . very poor . . . too young to know right from wrong and anyway never taught . . . no choice for them . . . punishment cruel and useless”? The real criminals, indeed, were the drivers whose coins filled the parking meters: were they not polluting the world with their cars?

Another motive for inaction was that, had the youths been arrested, nothing would have happened to them. They would have been back on the streets within the hour. Who would risk a screwdriver in the liver to safeguard the parking meters of Paris for an hour?

I am transfixed by the reports of riots gripping Parisian cites or suburbs, if you prefer. I was reading reports right after the first night of rioting in the overseas papers while our media overlooked them. I waited daily for the reports to reach our shores. Here is the Toronto Star’s account of night eight.

AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France - Rioting youths shot at police and firefighters today after burning car dealerships and public buses and hurling rocks at commuter trains. France’s government faced growing pressure to curb the violence, fuelled by anger over poor conditions in suburban Paris housing projects.

Rampaging for an eighth day, youths ignored an appeal for calm from French President Jacques Chirac, whose government worked feverishly to fend off a political crisis amid criticism that it has ignored problems in suburbs heavily populated by first- and second-generation North African and Muslim immigrants.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who postponed a visit to Canada this week to deal with the crisis, called a string of emergency meetings with cabinet ministers throughout the day. He told the Senate the government “will not give in” to violence in the troubled suburbs. “Order and justice will be the final word in our country,” Villepin said. “The return to calm and the restoration of public order are the priority — our absolute priority.”

The riots started last Thursday after the electrocution deaths of two teenagers hiding in a power station from police they believed were chasing them in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. By Wednesday night, violence had spread to at least 20 Paris-region towns, said Jean-Francois Cordet, the top government official for the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris where the violence has been concentrated. He said youths in the region fired four shots at riot police and firefighters but caused no injuries.

When the first reports started to appear in the Canadian papers after day five of rioting I felt oddly disappointed that no one seems to want to address the issues inherent in this situation, nor draw the obvious parallels to our home grown situation in Toronto. Observing the Paris riots we are being allowed a glimpse of our possible future if the tide does not turn. If you think I have entered into twilight zone territory read Dalrymple’s observations of the French criminal justice system circa 2002.

The laxisme of the French criminal justice system is now notorious. Judges often make remarks indicating their sympathy for the criminals they are trying (based upon the usual generalizations about how society, not the criminal, is to blame); and the day before I witnessed the scene on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, 8,000 police had marched to protest the release from prison on bail of an infamous career armed robber and suspected murderer before his trial for yet another armed robbery, in the course of which he shot someone in the head. Out on bail before this trial, he then burgled a house. Surprised by the police, he and his accomplices shot two of them dead and seriously wounded a third. He was also under strong suspicion of having committed a quadruple murder a few days previously, in which a couple who owned a restaurant, and two of their employees, were shot dead in front of the owners’ nine-year-old daughter.

The left-leaning Libération, one of the two daily newspapers the French intelligentsia reads, dismissed the marchers, referring with disdainful sarcaèm to la fièvre flicardiaire—cop fever. The paper would no doubt have regarded the murder of a single journalist—that is to say, of a full human being—differently, let alone the murder of two journalists or six; and of course no one in the newspaper acknowledged that an effective police force is as vital a guarantee of personal freedom as a free press, and that the thin blue line that separates man from brutality is exactly that: thin. This is not a decent thing for an intellectual to say, however true it might be.

It is the private complaint of everyone, however, that the police have become impotent to suppress and detect crime. Horror stories abound. A Parisian acquaintance told me how one recent evening he had seen two criminals attack a car in which a woman was waiting for her husband. They smashed her side window and tried to grab her purse, but she resisted. My acquaintance went to her aid and managed to pin down one of the assailants, the other running off. Fortunately, some police passed by, but to my acquaintance’s dismay let the assailant go, giving him only a warning.

My acquaintance said to the police that he would make a complaint. The senior among them advised him against wasting his time. At that time of night, there would be no one to complain to in the local commissariat. He would have to go the following day and would have to wait on line for three hours. He would have to return several times, with a long wait each time. And in the end, nothing would be done.

As for the police, he added, they did not want to make an arrest in a case like this. There would be too much paperwork. And even if the case came to court, the judge would give no proper punishment. Moreover, such an arrest would retard their careers. The local police chiefs were paid by results—by the crime rates in their areas of jurisdiction. The last thing they wanted was for policemen to go around finding and recording crime.

Not long afterward, I heard of another case in which the police simply refused to record the occurrence of a burglary, much less try to catch the culprits. Now crime and general disorder are making inroads into places where, not long ago, they were unheard of.

We are not quite there yet in Toronto but the path ahead is clear and the road ahead is well lit. In my own downtown Toronto neighborhood we are overrun and held hostage but crack cocaine dealers and their clientele from late afternoon until dawn each and every day. They set up shop outside my living room windows and on my porch. It is hard for me to comprehend that the drug laws have not been repelled as they operate so openly and freely. My children have learned first hand the unique patois of the drug dealers and have on occasion played havoc with the scum who have taken up shop on my front porch in the late afternoon by running up the street calling out “6 6 6” which translates into “the police are coming” in order to clear a path up the steps to our front door.

I cannot count the occasions that I and a few others have called the police who do often exhibit a distinct apathy to our plight. I have even offered to lend them my home to stake out the thugs; up close and personal. And in fairness to the police every once in a while they do a take down and we come out and cheer but it’s a short lived joy because in less than 48 hours the thugs are back. And I am back to arguing with a junkies who believe they have an innate right to smoke crack behind the hedge and blow their smoke into my front window or with the crowd of young men who believe that my home is their store front and my time is wisely spent cleaning up the mess and stink they leave behind in their wake. I have worked in the criminal justice system in Toronto and have seen first hand the sob stories offered up as a defense against barbarity and the judges who lap it up as mother’s milk as they pass what passes for justice served but rarely includes any lengthy period of incarceration. Everyone has a sob story to cry a river with but most of us dammed ours up and do not see it as an excuse to wreck havoc on those whose lives cross ours - yet.

I have these thoughts rambling around, bouncing off the walls in the looney bin that I call my mind about the explosion of violence on Toronto’s mean streets. There is a lot of talk from the media and civic activists concerning the need to address the “root”¨ causes that allegedly perpetrate violent crime. This more than anything illustrates how deeply the Marxist theory of crime has penetrated our culture. The modern poverty pimp mantra for the new millennium is that racism creates poverty, which in turn gives birth to crime, whose afterbirth is the creation of a culture of violence and despair. Hence, the need for immediate increases in after school programs and increased funding for recreation centres.

Oh, how can I forget; we need immediate job training programs too. Otherwise, we cannot expect to scoop up all the potential thugs in training before the professional thugs have a chance to continue their recruitment drives among our youth. Though why job training programs are seen as a pancreas for people who have refused to take advantage of free elementary education, I’ll never understand. Let’s not fool ourselves. Without at least half a generation of remedial education of the kind (they mostly opted out of the first time it was offered) will only give them the most basic tools to needed to function at minimal level. And why should they? Where’s the allure? Selling crack they make a $1000 for a few hours of hanging around with other like minded souls. How much training is really needed to learn to smile, as you say, “Do you want fries with that?” Do you really think to find among the willfully thuggish lurks a budding scientist who only requires a job training program to turn his back on crime so that he can settle down and find the cure for cancer?

The Tribe and I come from a long line of poor people on all sides that faced horrendous discrimination and poverty. No kings, queens, or even famous adventurer’s in our background unless you count a few notorious black sheeps in their local communities. Truth be told, I am poor today because I have deliberately chosen to be poor. I chose to expand most of my energies when I was young in a low paying profession but even then, when I had opportunities to marry great wealth, I choose instead someone who was not much better off than myself. Then we chose more or less in a passive-aggressive kind of way to have three children which has always been a serious strain on the family resources after taxes. Even now, I could make considerably more money that I do but that would mean I would have to sacrifice my time with the Tribe. I have opted to make them rather than making money my top priority in life - for now. But I am not a thug and vast majority of our ancestors, though poor have chosen not to be thugs. How does account for the “why” of that - if racism and poverty innately breeds crime?

My mother spent the first 8 years of her education in a one room schoolhouse (weather permitting) and she somehow learned to read, write and do math well enough to graduate from high school without once every resorting to crime. No special education programs unless you count absolute fear of a “good”¨ caning. No after school programs, no drop-in centres, no subsidized housing, no welfare, no food banks and certainly no job training programs unless you count peeling pulp for 10 cents a tree.

I suspect the residences of the French cites and our own home grown “disenfranchised” poor have never lived so well, but despite that fact, violent crime is much higher now than in the Dirty Thirties when there were no special action groups and the only professional social activists were church ladies knitting socks, gloves, scarves and hats for the parish poor. There were no special tailored job training programs, no welfare beyond the bare bones of “Relief”, no subsidizing housing, no after school programs and community centres were run by various church groups - where they existed at all.

What has changed is that the culture of personal responsibility lies dormant in the social order. Every societal ill is now a question for the great bureaucracy of the government to fix, to regulate, to shelter and to feed. Free will is meaningless in the culture of victimization. Is it any wonder that the poor now feel an entitlement to your income, your property, your life? Remember that when the day comes and the City of Toronto establishes a “safe consumption” site for crack cocaine addicts in the house next door.

France is the jewel of government bureaucracy and socialization, and yet, the cites of Paris are in flames with no end in sight. Many already have been crying that the government has been ineffective in assimilating second and third generation of Muslim North African immigrants into the wider cultural mosaic and the only cure is for more government programs and largess to morph them into law abiding citizens of the French Republic. Not enough time, education, or job training programs have been created to alleviate this sense of entitlement and barbarity. Odd how half a world away in Toronto the professional poverty pimps say the same thing, but I say; when you consign your life to the government you become merely a bystander in your own fate.