Along with the French, Chinese Police to Patrol Paris

From the Guardian

Paris police are to draft in reinforcements from China to help patrol the French capital during the summer tourist boom.

The foreign officers will be deployed to key landmarks to prevent Chinese visitors – around 1 million of whom come to France every year – being targeted by pickpockets and muggers.

A plan originating from the French Interior Ministry proposed that Chinese police officers would patrol with their French counterparts in Paris tourist spots. A ministry spokesperson refused to give details or numbers, but said their role would be preventative, and that they would operate as part of a global operation to protect tourists across the city.

Police say Chinese tourists often carry large amounts of cash, making them a target for attacks. Tourists from China are estimated to spend an average of €1,300 during their holidays, much of it on designer goods.

The move follows a rise in assaults by thieves on tourists from China. In March last year a group of 23 Chinese visitors were robbed in a restaurant shortly after arriving in Paris. The group was on a 12-day tour of Europe but stopped for dinner at Le Bourget in one of Paris's northern suburbs, where they were robbed of €7,500 cash, plane tickets and passports. The group leader was injured in the attack…

In central Paris, officers struggle to deal with organised gangs of thieves and pickpockets, many of them children, from the Balkans and eastern Europe, who harass tourists with fake "petitions" or demands for charity donations.

Some thoughts

Given how the Philippine government has been eager to embrace US bases, will the Philippine government do a copycat and ask US police to patrol the streets of Manila for the "protection of American tourists"?

Chinese cash rich tourists as targets by domestic thieves and Chinese police presence in Paris exude a crucial shift in the balance of economic and geopolitical power

The above also demonstrates the incompetence of centralized political institutions that are supposed to protect people within their defined political boundaries.

The French socialist government’s drafting of external police force exhibits such patent government failure.

If the French government “struggle to deal with organised gangs of thieves and pickpockets”, how will the Chinese police help solve such problems when the latter seems hardly familiar with the French geography, the political, legal and or cultural system?  

Yet the Chinese police seem to have a handful of domestic criminal issues to deal with.

The Chinese police may “help victims to make a police complaint” but farther than these they are unlikely to succeed, unless the French are convinced of a Jet Li solution.

Private Police anyone?