You can’t put a guard in every church and patrol every beach. But after a wave of attacks in Western Europe, authorities are struggling to protect their people as best they can. The French Riviera city of Cannes has banned large backpacks on beaches lest they hide explosives, and Britain is providing extra funding for security at tens of thousands of places of worship.
The grisly slaying this week of an elderly priest celebrating Mass in a Normandy church, less than two weeks after 84 revelers were mowed down by a truck on a beachfront promenade in Nice, sounded the alarm that nothing is sacred and no place is safe. Four attacks in a week in Germany sealed that conviction.
The attacks in France and two of the four in Germany were claimed by ISIS.
“Churches take great pride in being open. But there comes a time when the reality of crime and the reality of terrorism may mean that some of that balance needs to be readjusted,” said Mark Gardner, spokesman for Community Security Trust which provides extensive protection to Jewish synagogues and schools throughout Britain.
The Trust started operating in 1994 after a car bomb attack on the Israeli Embassy in London injured roughly 20 people and a devastating attack on a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killed 85 people.
France has been muscling up its security forces since two waves of ISIS-claimed attacks in 2015 that left 147 dead – and after two March attacks in Belgium that killed 32. President Francois Hollande has ordered 10,000 soldiers who have been patrolling since last year to stay in the streets, has called up reserves to bolster police and borders, and plans to use some to create a National Guard.
But the challenge of protecting churches, synagogues, tourist haunts, beaches, summer festival sites, airports and train stations is among the most daunting tasks security forces have faced in recent times in France, and Europe.
Some towns are pitching in as they can, or inventing new rules to ward off threats.
The mayor of Rive-de-Gier, a small town near Lyon, decided this week to “systematically refuse” new applications by residents to bring their families to live with them, a process most often used by immigrants with loved ones in another country.
Whether the mayor can actually change national policy allowing families to live together remains to be seen, but the initiative reflects a rising level of fear.