A third consecutive night of violence in France sparked by the killing of a teenager by a policeman led to 875 arrests, 249 injured police and gendarmes, 492 damaged buildings, 2,000 burned vehicles and 3,880 fires started, according to figures given by President Emmanuel Macron at the start of a crisis meeting on Friday.

Around 40,000 police were mobilized nationwide to deal with riots on Thursday with another night marked by pillaging of shops, public buildings targeted, including a police station in the Pyrenees city of Pau, and an elementary school and a district office set on fire in Lille.

President Emmanuel Macron left early from an EU summit in Brussels and will on Friday chair a crisis meeting on the violence – the second such emergency talks in as many days. 

The unrest has followed the fatal shooting during a traffic stop of 17-year-old Naël, whose death has revived longstanding grievances about policing and racial profiling in France's low-income and multiethnic suburbs.

Thousands of police and gendarmes – along with elite Raid and GIGN units – were deployed in several cities overnight, with curfews issued in municipalities around Paris and bans on public gatherings in Lille and Tourcoing in the country's north.

Despite the massive security deployment, violence and damage were reported in multiple areas. 

French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said on Friday that the emergency cabinet meeting with Macron would review "all options."

"The priority is to ensure national unity and the way to do it is to restore order," Borne said during a visit to a Paris suburb.

Meanwhile, the United Nations said France should address deep issues of racist discrimination in its police.

"We are concerned by the killing of a 17-year-old of North African descent by police," said UN human rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasan.

"This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and racial discrimination in law enforcement."

The policeman who killed the French teenager in a Paris suburb on Tuesday, has apologised to the family while in custody, his lawyer said.

"The first words he pronounced were to say sorry and the last words he said were to say sorry to the family," Laurent-Franck Lienard told French TV channel BFMTV.

"He is devastated, he doesn't get up in the morning to kill people. He didn't want to kill him."

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