France: Police Call for Systematic Eviction of Thieving Gypsy Roma

Daily Mail
April 23, 2014

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A brazen gang of thieves creep up behind a tourist at a cash machine in Paris.

With the bells of Notre Dame heralding a glorious Easter Sunday morning, a tourist uses a cash point a short stroll from the ancient Paris cathedral.

Within seconds he is surrounded by an aggressive gang of Roma sneak thieves, who make no secret of what they want from him.

Feeling hands on his back and arms, the middle age man turns around in horror to see the utterly fearless gang casually trying to help themselves to his money.

Such scenes have become so common in the French capital that police last week called for the ‘systematic eviction’ of Roma.

Groups of thieves, many of them teenagers, swarm around the main tourist landmarks day and night.

‘They respect nobody – they just want money or anything else they can steal,’ said another tourist who witnessed the incident at the cashpoint between Notre Dame and the Louvre museum, in the 1st arrondissement.

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The middle-aged victim turns around in a fright as the thieves swarm around him.

‘It might have been Easter, but the gangs were everywhere,’ she said. ‘One minute the man was making a cash withdrawal, the next he was a crime victim.

‘If the police come anywhere near the Roma, they just laugh and then run off. Areas are becoming completely lawless.’

Paris is the most popular tourist destination in the world, and the British make up the city’s biggest visitor group, but its battle against the Roma is a losing one.

Charity and human rights groups were furious last week when a leaked police memo called for the ‘systematic eviction’ of Roma from the centre of the city.

It followed the country’s Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, saying that the travelling communities of mainly Romanians and Bulgarians ‘cannot integrate’ and should be deported.

A spokesman for Charity group Catholic Help described the note as a ‘scandal’, saying that it ‘stigmatised a poor community’ and amounted to ‘racial profiling’- something which is illegal in secular France.

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The utterly fearless gang casually try to help themselves to the horrified man’s money.

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