Paris, Locked Down

After the horrific attack on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo Wednesday, Paris woke up Thursday in lockdown mode. If anything, tension in the city seems to be tightening, and for good reason. Following a separate attack, two gunmen shot and killed a policewoman in southwestern Paris this morning. Meanwhile, the two main Charlie Hebdo killers remain at large. An “attack alert” has been declared across the whole Ile de France region, the nation’s highest state of security readiness.

In practice, this means that the usual security measures—police surveillance of key institutions, transit and public areas—have been beefed up massively. Cars are now banned from parking directly outside schools (where all field trips have been cancelled), and “crisis cells” for managing emergencies have been set up in ministries and the prefectures than govern the wider Paris region. The city’s police presence has also mushroomed, with 1300 soldiers and gendarme military police now drafted in from across Northern France. Right now, police are trying to turn Paris Proper into a form of fortress, placing a police guard at each one of the city gates—still the sole entry points across the Parisian beltway—ready to give chase if the Charlie Hebdo attackers return.