Thid theves allowed to run riot in Part

Press, 16 June 1982, Page 25

Thid theves allowed to run riot in Part

From

WALTER SCHWARTZ,

The two children came up the stairs of the Metro at the Palais Royal as I was going down. Recognising them as celebrities, I turned and followed them. They went north, very fast and purposefully, up the Rue de Rivoli, dodged back east to the Rue Saint-Honore, then north again. .

The girl was about 12, pretty, in a bedraggled long skirt:' the boy about eight, watchful, agile, and graceful.He kept looking back. I tried keeping out of sight on the Other pavement behind parked cars, but after about 10 minutes he. must have spotted me. In an instant, they had vanished. They belonged to the legendary, impregnable band of' Metro beggars, Yugoslav Gypsies, playing joyfully at purse-snatching. There are a hundred of them at play every day, between Chatelet and Concorde in the Metro, and out on the pavements at the . Louvre/ the' Rue de Rivoli; and the lower reaches of the Champs-Elysees. They have had their pictureen the front page of the “Figaro,” in “France Soir” magazine, in the serious /'Nouvel : Observateur,” and 'on the television.. Every policeman, and policewoman

and social worker in the Metro and in the First Arrondissement of Paris, around the Commissariat of Les Halles, knows them all by sight and more or less by. name..

They work in twos or gangs' of up to ten. The Metro police say they earn $l2OO pier gang per day for their parents and anonymous uncles in the Gypsy encampments on the outskirts in the north: More conservatively. Commissioner Guyot at Les Halles put it at $660 per week per child. The boy and the girl I saw had had their picture in the newspaper two days earlier, at work with the toys of their trade: square pieces of cardboard bearing a semiliterate hard-luck slogan. They were still carrying the same toy-tools, ready for play. .. .

The cardboard is thrust with the left hand at the victim — preferably a Japanese tourist, an old lady, or a dumb-looking blonde — leaving the right hand free to feel for the purse. The big gang technique is to crowd round, with a bigger girl out front carrying a ■ baby, the six-year-olds crowding in . on. the sides.

whining for money, tugging at sleeves. It is over in seconds. One child gets the purse, another whisks it away, a third extracts the money and discards the purse, a fourth gets the money out and away.•' “It’s a game for them, like cops and robbers used to be for us,” said Commissioner Guyot. “They learn it in their

mother's arms.” • Th.e secret is childishly simple. French law does not allow the detention of anyone under 13, even for a day. And social practice for decades has stopped children's judges from sending offenders to lock-up remand homes.

“Guardian,” in Paris

Every day, every juvenile Metro Gypsy is hauled to a police station at least once, kept an hour or two, and sent back to work. In Les Halles Commissariat I saw the usual batch of a dozen captives, more or less locked up in a corridor, aged

between six and 16 (nobody admitted to being a day more than 13, the fatal age), laughing, playing, and joking with three policemen. "We’re beaten. There’s nothing we can do for the moment,” says Miss Nadine Joly. She, as famous in her own right as the children, is the new, attractive Commissioner of the Paris Metro Police, aged 29. with 45

plain-clothes detectives, 241 uniformed railway police, and 144 gendarmes under her command. Her discreet office 4s on the Direction Vincennes platform of the Bastille station.

“We can cope with pickpockets — real artists — we deal with suicides under the trains, and we have a technique for rioters. But these kids are different.” The simple assumption behind French law is that a child has no legal responsibility. but if caught he or she is sure to be claimed and soundly beaten by his or her irate dad. "It’s true of the French, it’s true for the Portuguese, and it’s true for the Arabs — but not these kids,” Commissioner Guyot complains. “Nobody ever comes to claim them, so if we hold them we’re stuck. At best, a kid might be fetched by some girl a bit older, carrying a baby, but, of course, no papers.” No papers, no names, no parents, only bafflement for the police. "They all seem to claim the same name and one supposes they’re all a vast family,” the commissioner says. “Of course, they all say they’re under 13 even when thev aren’t. We've tried ; 4

having them examined, but how can you prove anything?” There is more paternal sorrow than open racism in the police concern — a healthy contrast to everyday attitudes around Les Halles. “In the end somebody’s going to have to put up the money for a real solution: a proper hostel with all the facilities where we can keep the kids locked up, secure until the parents have to come and claim them. Then, if there’s no improvement, we can get the parents and- the. whole clan expelled,” the commissioner says. This is Utopia. “We’ve tried sending them to homes," says the more sceptical Miss Joly. “They stay just long enough for lunch and melt away. Once we tried a lock-up hostel in Paris. The kids broke the place apart to get out, and now the place won’t take any more Gypsy children.” Are they really Yugoslav? Are they really Gypsies? "They speak French to their victims, but not to us,” Miss Joly says. “When they have an interpreter it’s Serbo--Croat. They’re said to be of the Rum tribe, which I suppose is from : Rumania really.”