Pickpockets force closure of Paris’s Louvre museum

PARIS, France (Updated) – Paris’s Louvre museum did not open on Wednesday due to a walkout by some staff in protest at a rise in aggressive pickpockets, including children, who target both workers and tourists.

The museum — one of the world’s largest and most-visited — said it had already lodged a complaint with prosecutors in December 2012 over the rise in pickpockets, and demanded a greater police presence.

“Two hundred staff exercised their right to walk off the job on Wednesday,” a museum spokesperson told AFP.

About 100 staff later gathered in front of the Ministry of Culture where a delegation was received.

Christelle Guyader of the SUD union said staff had had enough of dealing with the often-violent thieves.

“Sometimes they come to work afraid because they find themselves confronted with organised groups of pickpockets who are increasingly aggressive and which include children, who get into the museum free and even when taken in for questioning by police, come back a few days later,” she said.

Numerous staff had reported “spitting, insults, threats and being struck”, by the pickpockets and had repeatedly reported the incidents, Guyader said.

“There are always pickpockets at the Louvre and other tourist hotspots in central Paris, but for a year and a half they have been more and more violent… and their way of working well organised,” said staff member Sophie Aguirre, also of the SUD union.

The museum’s management told AFP it would from now on impose temporary restrictions on entry to the museum for anyone already identified as a pickpocket.

Some 150 individual complaints had been included in the management’s complaint to the prosecuting authorities, it added.

The Louvre, which receives some 10 million visitors a year, has around 1,000 staff with some 470 present on any one day. – with Agence France-Presse