France’s President Emmanuel Macron blamed social media and video games for having “intoxicated” young people and fueling the riots as he urged parents to keep their children home after a third night of unrest in the wake of the police killing of a teenager.

The president cut short a trip to Brussels and convened an emergency cabinet meeting at the Élysée Palace in Paris to discuss measures aimed at calming tensions that had seen cars set on fire, looting and clashes between protesters and police. Still, the country is bracing for another night of violence ahead of the teen’s funeral Saturday.

The escalating crisis is a test for Macron, a leader whose ambition on the world stage has in recent months been challenged by dysfunction at home. And it is a painful moment of reckoning for France as the death of a teenager reignites a fraught debate about race, identity and policing.

Protests have spread from Paris to several French cities outside the capital including Marseille, Lyon and Toulouse since the death of a 17-year-old boy identified only as Nahel M., who was shot by a police officer after being pulled over in a traffic stop Tuesday. The officer has since been detained and has issued an apology to the boy’s family.

France’s Interior Ministry said it had deployed 40,000 officers across the country, and cities have suspended public transportation and announced curfews. Over 800 people were arrested or detained after the third night of protests and at least 200 police officers injured, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said. Officials in France’s second city, Marseille, said Friday that public transport would be halted from 7 p.m. local time and public protests banned.

“All options” were on the table for the government to restore order, France’s Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne said earlier Friday, calling the violence “intolerable and inexcusable,” on Twitter. Macron has also decried attacks against the police and damage to public buildings as “unjustifiable.”

By speaking out early and cutting short his trip to the E.U. summit, Macron has tried to signal that he understands the stakes.

“Normally leaders don’t comment, they let justice do the work,” said Philippe Marlière, a professor of French politics at University College London. “There’s a kind of a consensus in France that you do not criticize the police.”

But Macron’s message has been muddled. He was filmed attending an Elton John concert in Paris Wednesday evening as protests were underway, for instance.

And in remarks Friday, he focused on the need for parents to control their children and the risks of social media, not racial injustice in policing.

In France, some saw parallels between the killing and police violence in the United States.

“Leaving aside the completely specific American racial context, the events are reminiscent of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man suffocated by a White Minneapolis police officer in May 2020,” read an editorial in Le Monde published Thursday.

The paper called for France to clarify its 2017 Public Security Act, particularly rules on the use of firearms. “In France, no ordinary citizen, nor any police officer for that matter, should die during a traffic stop,” it read.

Deadly shootings are far less common in France than in the United States, and the case has sparked massive public outrage not witnessed in the country since Floyd’s killing which sparked global protests in 2020 and ignited a global reckoning around race and police behavior.

French activists have since demanded an end to what they call discriminatory police tactics that disproportionately target minorities in France, mostly people of African and Arab descent.

Nationwide protests erupted after videos of the incident went viral online in France this week, appearing to show two police officers standing beside a stationary yellow Mercedes AMG car, with at least one officer pointing a gun through the driver’s window. The car begins to drive off, and the officer pulls the trigger, at close range. Later footage shows the car, which had at least two other passengers in it aside from Nahel, crashed at the side of the road.

According to an account by Pascal Prache, the regional public prosecutor, the officers had tried to get the driver to pull over for a police check, but he sped away. After chasing the car through the streets of Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris, the officers pulled up alongside the car when it stopped in traffic on a major thoroughfare.

Nahel’s mother, Mounia, wearing a white T-shirt that read “Justice for Nahel,” led a protest in his memory on Thursday, attended by thousands. Nahel is believed to be of Algerian and Moroccan descent.

French celebrities including soccer star Kylian Mbappé and actor Omar Sy have expressed their solidarity and outrage. Assa Traoré, whose half brother Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old Black man who died in police custody in 2016, also issued a video in support, drawing parallels between the cases and decrying police brutality and racism.

“This morning he gave me a big kiss. He said, ‘Mom, I love you,’” Nahel’s mother said, recalling the last time she saw her son alive on Tuesday. “We left at the same time — he went to get a McDonald’s. I went to work like everyone else. An hour later they told me … that my son had been shot.”