Police/Racial Profiling/no sleep

This was NOT the entry I was expecting to write about on the day that I move from my host family's place to my apartment. But since I have to do that soon, I'll make this entry quick.

Last night was my friend Miranda's bday and we picnicked at a popular spot for young people, the tip of the Ile de la Cite. The recently-acquired boy in my life, Yann, came too, and he happened to be the only French person in the large group of Miranda's friends. Most of Miranda's friends left around 12:30 to catch the last metro, but some of us stuck around. Yann and I were just thinking of taking a nice romantic stroll along the Seine when chaos ensued.

In French there's a word, racaille, which the dictionary defines as "riff-raff" but the French explain as "those sketchy guys who are immigrants who wear sports clothes/ gangster clothes and are annoying and never leave girls alone and just hang around doing nothing on the Champs Elysees or Chatelet or other popular areas." Note that they are almost always immigrants--they are French Africans or 'Maghreb', aka French North Africans.

Last night, a group of guys that the French would definitely call racaille invaded our picnic briefly. One of them took the bottle of wine that I had bought for Miranda. It was 2/3 done, we didn't care too much about the wine, just about the fact that they thought they could annoy us by taking it which bothered us. So we kept saying "come on Monsieur, it's her birthday, let her have the wine" while simultaneously telling them to get lost. Next thing you know, the leader of the pack, an African wearing all black and a red baseball cap and a shiny silver decorated buckle on his belt (how many times did I have to describe this to the police? Oh hold on, we're getting there) puts down the wine, and takes this girl Victoria's camera, which is sitting right next to the wine bottle. Why she didn't put her camera back in her bag, I don't know, but that's when it got messy. Our friend Ryan (also from LA) was drunk enough to get aggressive with one of the guys... and we got scared. Nothing physical happened, but we knew at this point we weren't getting the camera back. They kept passing it between them, and running off. Other people in the area tried to talk to them as well, but no luck. Yann, the only Frenchy in our group, tried to talk to them, but also no luck. Finally Yann, Ryan, Victoria, and this guy Jonathan (also from LA) started chasing them down the banks of the Seine, while Jonathan is calling the cops. The guys get away, and Ryan leaves, because he isn't legally allowed to be living and working in France, and doesn't want to deal with the cops.

Once the police come, we give them a description of the leader of the pack, the one who took the camera, and within minutes they find someone who matches that exact description. We walk over to Chatelet and we see it's him, it's definitely him. However, they also have about 6 other Africans and two Maghreb guys with them, none of which match our description. That's when I started to get upset. Here were some completely innocent guys, just chillin' in a spot that happened to be where this jackass was apprehended, and because they were black/middle eastern males, the police started interrogating them. Miranda and I kept going up to the police saying "it's not them it's not them we're sure it's not them." All of the guys in that group that took the camera were wearing sporty/gangster shiny black jackets. These guys weren't. We felt horrible.

Then we had to go to the police station, where we stayed for 2 hours as they got down every detail of our story. The guy they apprehended put up a huge fight. He was screaming and banging and I almost started feeling sorry for him. I really did. This whole situation was so messed up. First the racial profiling, then the way they treated this guy (Miranda saw them perform some sort of neck-twisting move on him... not what I wanted to hear), and plus, poor Yann has a final today, and he was NOT supposed to stay out until 4 am being the "translator," despite the fact that we could all speak French pretty well. I felt SO SO SO bad that he was involved in this. I'm moving today, I wasn't supposed to stay out till 4 am either! And Miranda... well, now she's got a crazy story to tell about her 21st.

In the end, they never found the camera, and they never probably will. And now Victoria has to go to court against this guy.

8 months in Paris, and this is the first time something like this has happened...