France: Situation Normal, All Fouled Up:

Reuters reports:

Urban violence in France fell to normal levels on Thursday after three weeks of rioting in run-down suburbs, allowing the government to begin mapping out plans to tackle the problems that sparked the unrest.

Ninety-eight vehicles were set ablaze during the night, a sharp drop from the peak of the violence when 1,400 vehicles were torched in one night on November 6 by youths who say they are excluded from mainstream French society.

"The situation has returned to normal because about 100 vehicles are set on fire each night in France," a police spokesman said. [Via Mangan]

Since France's population is 1/5th that of America's, that would be the equivalent of 180,000 cars set on fire hear each year.

I've been poking around trying to find out how many car fires there are in America annually. So far, all I've found is that there are a lot in Detroit:

A big problem, the [[Detroit] arson squad member said, comes from car owners looking to illegally cash in on their auto insurance policies. The arson squad handles about 4,000 vehicle arson cases a year.

"Most car fires are set in southwest Detroit, for a few reasons," Sanders said. "First, there are a lot of remote places in that area where people can take their cars to be burned.

"Also, southwest Detroit is easily accessible from suburbs such as River Rouge and Melvindale. A lot of people bring their cars in from the suburbs to burn them in the city because of all the remote areas here." [Maybe the Detroit Tourism Board's new slogan should be: "Tired of civilization? Want to get away from it all? Come experience true isolation in Detroit!"]

But a state law passed last year is making would-be auto arsonists think twice about torching their cars in Detroit. Michigan Public Act 413, which took effect in 2001, mandates that anyone making an insurance claim for a car burned in Detroit must first be interviewed by members of the arson squad before collecting any insurance money.

Detroit's disastrous "Devil's Night" orgy of arson centering around the night before Halloween peaked at over 800 incidents during 1984 (it has sensed declined), but only a few dozen of them were car burnings even in the mid-1980s.

And here's a 1994 statistic citing 41,000 cases of vehicle arson in the U.S., or about 1/4th the French rate.

But, are the 100 cars burned on the average night in France auto-immolations by owners trying to cheat their insurance companies or vandalism by endemic rioters?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer