The evacuation took everyone by surprise, or almost since rumors were buzzing around Forceval on Tuesday morning. At 7 a.m. this Wednesday morning, several hundred police officers were deployed to dismantle this open-air crack consumption site located next to Porte de la Villette (19th arrondissement). Users were grouped together awaiting their evacuation to emergency accommodation places, police stations for those in violation or in an irregular situation, while agents of the City of Paris in white coveralls cleaned the site and destroyed the makeshift bulldozer shelters. On the spot, the prefect of police, Laurent Nunez, that of Ile-de-France, Marc Guillaume, and the director of the ARS, Amélie Verdier, supervised the operation mounted in the greatest secrecy, the town hall of the 19th arrondissement having for example been warned late Tuesday evening and that of Pantin learning it in the early morning.
The dismantling is all the more surprising since ten days ago, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the installation of crack users on the Forceval site by the prefect Didier Lallement, elected officials and groups of local residents denounced a year of immobility. But it is true that last July, Gérald Darmanin had set the priority of Laurent Nunez, just appointed, to put an end to the problem of crack in Paris. It was he who publicly announced the operation on Twitter.
“It looks like bullshit”
At the Le Flash café, a stone’s throw from Forceval, residents of the 93 Anti-crack collective, present on site from early morning, debrief the situation and are skeptical. “There is a strong feeling of ambivalence, testifies Dominique Gamard, resident of the neighboring district of Quatre-Chemins. This satisfies our first demand, which was to evacuate the camp, but it looks like bullshit. »
Because the collective is worried about the crucial question of the aftermath. “Our demand was for controlled evacuation with medico-social support for crack users,” continues Dominique Gamard. But here we have an evacuation without preparation, dry and which will just scatter the users. “My first reaction was ‘But where are they going to put them? », Says for her part Marie Öngün-Rombaldi, the general manager of Fédération Addictions who discovered the operation this Wednesday morning. Marie Debrus, referent on the reduction of risks related to drug use at Doctors of the World, does not say anything else: “Without real medico-social action, the police action this morning will come down to a simple dispersal operation. Other scenes of drug use will reappear, as they have for thirty years. »
Same speech on the side of local elected officials. Bertrand Kern, PS mayor of Pantin fears that “this evacuation was poorly prepared with undervalued health resources, leading to a reconstitution of the camp once the police demobilized”. And François Dagnaud, mayor of the 19th expresses his “relief” but maintains “extreme vigilance on the continuation of the device and the support at the end of this operation whose [il] hope that it is not dry and that it will continue with appropriate medico-social devices”.
Mods on the run?
The question of the aftermath is all the more significant since, according to the residents of 93 Anti-crack, the modous – the crack dealers – packed up on Tuesday when rumors of an evacuation were circulating and therefore escaped the blow of net. And, according to a police source, many foreigners in an irregular situation present on the site destroy their papers so that we do not know to which country to deport them. Nevertheless, the PP ensures that this dismantling is final and that there will be no return of an open-air consumption scene in Forceval, in particular thanks to the presence of police forces on site.
Behind the bar counter Le Magenta, Hani in office since 2005, welcomes the evacuation because “it bothered everyone”. Since the arrival of crack in Forceval, he has seen some of his clients desert. “They can no longer have a coffee outside without being disturbed, as soon as we leave a little change it disappears,” he explains. He also recounts having been the victim of an attack no later than Monday morning around 6 a.m.: “A young woman from Forceval asked me to use the toilets and then to offer her a coffee, and as I refused, she took glasses and threw them all over the bar and hit me with an umbrella. Sitting not far away filling a PMU grid, Layachi is a regular customer even though he lives at Porte de Pantin. For him, this evacuation, “it feels good” because “it’s shit”. “You can’t walk with your wife or your daughter, they attack constantly,” he denounces. Vincent, who moved to the neighborhood a week after the crack users, approves of this evacuation because “when you go home or invite people over, everyone is a little scared”. “We see precariousness everywhere in Paris but here it is particularly concentrated because there are drugs in addition, adds the young man. But, even if we put users in centers, the drug will not disappear. »