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As France ramped up its preparations for the 2024 Summer Olympics, law enforcement officials cracked down on the sale of counterfeit luxury goods.
Police officers raided one popular flea market in early April, confiscating 63,000 counterfeit items including fake Nike shoes, Louis Vuitton bags and other would-be luxury goods. Officials closed 11 stores and arrested 10 individuals, according to Reuters.
In Seine-Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb that will play host to the Olympics closing ceremony, as well as the swimming and track and field events, officials have long had concerns about the presence of knockoff goods.
“We’ve been talking about the problem of counterfeits for the last two years,” Michel Lavaud, the suburb’s police security chief, told Reuters.
UNIFAB, France’s intellectual property protection association, has also expressed concern about visitors purchasing counterfeit goods. Both the International Olympic Committee and Paris 2024 organizers joined the association to preempt concerns about branded merchandise being counterfeited.
“We’ve been working a lot ahead of the Olympic Games, there were a lot of operations carried out, with training over almost 18 months for operational agents, the police, customs, the gendarmerie, fraud prevention,” UNIFAB head Delphine Sarfati-Sobreira told Reuters.
“And there were big, major operations, like a few weeks ago, the closure of more than 10 stores in the Saint-Ouen area, which is 500 meters from the Olympic village. Thousands of fake products were seized, to really clean up this area where there were a lot of counterfeits in circulation.”
Some organizations, however, have been critical of the police raids – pointing to the ways in which crackdowns disproportionately impact poorer communities.
Researcher Axel Wilmort, of French social science institute for urban studies LAVUE, noted that increased police presence and the installation of barriers in places where there were once vendors, could also be linked to a desire to erase less affluent Parisians. He also claims that law enforcement officials sometimes fail to distinguish between legitimate second-hand goods and counterfeit items.
“There is a will to erase all signs of precarity, poverty and undesirables,” Wilmort told Reuters.