A utopian dream of a new urban community, built here in the 1970s, had slowly degraded into a poor neighborhood plagued by aimless youth before it finally burst into flames three weeks ago. After Karim Boudouda, a 27-year-old of North African descent, and some of his friends had robbed a casino, he was killed in an exchange of automatic gunfire with the police. The next night, Villeneuve, a carefully planned neighborhood of Grenoble in eastern France, exploded. A mob torched nearly 100 cars, wrecked a tram car and burned an annex of city hall. The police, reinforced by national riot police, responded in 'Robocop' gear, with helicopters flying overhead and television cameras in place, and made a number of arrests in a series of raids. President Nicolas Sarkozy quickly seized on the event as a symbol for a new campaign to get tough on immigration and crime. On July 30, about 10 days after the riots, he flew to Grenoble to make a fierce speech condemning violence, blaming 'insufficiently regulated immigration' that has 'led to a failure of integration.' He vowed to deny automatic citizenship at 18 to French-born children of foreigners if they are juvenile delinquents. He said he would also strip foreign-born nationals of French citizenship if they had been convicted of threatening or harming a police officer, or of crimes like polygamy and female circumcision, which are widespread in North Africa. 'French nationality is earned, and one must prove oneself worthy of it,' he said. 'When you open fire on an agent of the forces of order, you're no longer worthy of being French.' After the riots, Sarkozy's interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, fired the local police chief. Michel Destot, Grenoble's Socialist mayor, said the firing was unjust. Grenoble needs more police officers, he said, having lost 17 percent of its force since 2002, after Sarkozy, then interior minister, sharply reduced beat policing. The mayor said Sarkozy was using Villeneuve for political ends, when the problems are deeper and national. 'We're in one of the so-called great countries of human rights,' he said, but Sarkozy's pledge of 'going to war against criminals' really means 'going to war against an ethnic community, against a neighborhood,' which Destot called 'insane.' 'The role of political leaders is, on the contrary, to bring people together, to make peace in a certain way,' he said. 