French City Has to Launch Police Brigade to Deal Exclusively with Minor Migrant Crime

Police in the French city of Bordeaux have had to launch a specialised brigade to tackle minor migrant criminals, with around a third of burglaries and nearly half of pickpocketing now committed by migrant minors, for example.

The officers of the new brigade are tasked specifically with dealing with migrant offenders who claim to be underage, several hundred of whom operate on the streets of the city and are greatly overrepresented in various types of crimes.

“They mainly attack more vulnerable people… they can easily steal a phone, whether with cunning or violence, because often, they commit the acts [in groups of] two or three,” police officer Jean-Marc said, TF1 reports.

According to local police, however, just half of the migrants are actually minors. Many simply say they are in a bid to receive more lenient treatment from police and from the French criminal justice system.

The phenomenon has been seen across France, with some bizarre cases reported in which a clearly adult male criminal pretends to be a child.

Such a case was reported in May of last year, and saw a partially bald Moroccan illegal with a beard claim to be 17. Medical tests unsurprisingly revealed he was lying about his age.

 

The migrants in Bordeaux originate primarily from North Africa, usually Tunisia, Algeria, or Morocco and steal as many as 15 smartphones per day, which are then sold for a massive profit in North Africa by other criminals who may buy a phone for as little as 40 to 100 euros but sell them for as much as a thousand euros.

Those behind the networks, according to officer Jean-Marc, are usually older and not known to the police. They recruit on social media by displaying apparent lives of luxury, enticing migrants to travel illegaly to France.

Bordeaux is not the only city in which minor migrant criminality has local authorities concerned. In Paris, migrant minors are also overrepresented in many crimes, with local police noting they had gone from committing just three per cent of robberies in 2016 to 29 per cent in 2020.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.