I laughed when my daughter's friend's parents from L.A. wouldn't let their daughter come to Paris because they had seen the movie Taken and thought there was a slight, but real, danger the girl could be kidnapped into white slavery. I laughed when one of my brothers, who is 6'4" (196 cm), came to visit me in Paris and looked over his shoulder constantly as he walked around with me at night. I thought it was funny when he kept asking if we were in a safe part of town... wasn't every part of Paris safe? Well, not really-- but compared to some of his midwestern city, all of Paris is safe. Violent crime tends to be confined to the high-rise projects in the suburbs, which are like a different country from the petit bijou that is Paris.
But this year there have been some disturbing indications that that is changing, and Parisians are noticing. On Wednesday a teenage boy going home from school was ambushed at a bus stop by a gang of other boys. He was kicked, beaten with fists and baseball bats, and left for dead in a normal part of the fourteenth arrondissement in the middle of the afternoon, as dozens of people watched helplessly.
All right, his name was Souleymane (i.e. he is not franco-français; most of the violence in Paris is not franco-français) and he was wearing in the thirteenth arrondissement wearing a backpack that said "The fourteenth [arrondissement] fucks the thirteenth" [Le XIV nique le XIII]. But he's now in a coma in critical condition. This kind of thing didn't use to happen in Paris.
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