Calm has returned to La Grande Borne. Local mafia again exercise lazy control from the doorways of this vast housing estate south of Paris; their guns on show, their faces hidden, writes Lucy Williamson in this report for BBC News.
After days of riots, there is no sign of the police.
"In some banlieues [suburban estates], they are better equipped than us; they have better weapons," one police officer told us, on condition we keep his identity hidden.
The officer we spoke to spent last week facing rioters in several estates around Paris, as towns and cities across France erupted in rage at the killing of Nahel M, who was 17.
He was shot dead at a police traffic stop in Nanterre, west of Paris, and the policeman who fired through the car window is in detention accused of "voluntary homicide".
The riots were "super-violent", the officer said. But the problem between French suburbs and French police goes much deeper than occasional eruptions of fireworks and Molotov cocktails.
Distrust and resentment smoulder beneath the surface in places like La Grande Borne, less visible than the weapons carried by gangs here, but just as likely to explode.
"When we intervene in an estate, there is fear on both sides," the officer said. "But the police should not be afraid. Fear doesn't help in making the right choices."
The question now being asked, from the estates to the Élysée Palace, is how to prevent these tensions igniting again.
Djigui Diarra is a film-maker who grew up in La Grande Borne, which is one of the poorest housing estates in France.
"My first encounter with police was when I was 10 years old," he explained, as we sat in the simple concrete playground he used to visit as a child, surrounded by low-rise apartment blocks.
It was a police identification check on an older member of his group, someone he saw as a "big brother".
"They were really rude, so my big brother responded and they put him down [on the ground]," the 27-year-old said. "This was my first encounter with police and as a kid I said to myself, 'this will be my natural enemy'".
That was around the time that France scrapped community policing, known in the country as the "police of proximity" - something Djigui believes was a big mistake.
"With the police of proximity, there was a lack of violence, a lack of criminality," he said. "The language [was] great; they respected people. You have to put people together to feel each other."
Now they only come when there's trouble, he added.
Djigui - whose name means "hope" in Mali's Bambara language - said he had been called "gorilla" and "monkey" by police officers during ID checks.