| The climate is tense. Earlier this month, there was a stampede of hundreds, that ended up with several people in the hospital. The reason? Some german girls made a flashmob, as they had been doing it for years - but this time people thought that it was another terrorist attack [1]. There need to be limits, and while it is very difficult for everyone to agree on where they stand, and easy for us to mock the "Leaders need to do SOMETHING!", they only have so many tools to try and improve the situation. Banning the burkini is one of them (that I don't find particularly useful, but anyway). Once burkini has been banned, you can respect the law and/or protest against it. If you choose to protest it with civil disobedience, you go to the beach and refuse to leave, this is going to happen. So this woman might have decided along the way that it was better to take some clothes off than to leave, or perhaps she was fined and was trying to talk herself out of it. Who knows? We lack sufficient information. But I don't think it is justified to classify this as "police forcingly undress and shame woman", and make the moral parallel with islamic police making women cover themselves. Pkgundert's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12352409) gives some reasons. You could also read that and cynically say that France is here also practicing tyranny. The fact is that the context of this news is that France is in state of emergency, and this woman chose to practice civil disobedience in Nice barely a month after the Nice attack. For comparison, as you say you are american: ranked against all terrorist attacks in USA [2], Nice would end up ranking 3rd or 4th. Perhaps that's what the terrorists want. But the fact is that the tension is already there, and there would have been problems even without the police: >“The saddest thing was that people were shouting ‘go home’, some were applauding the police,” she said. “Her daughter was crying.” [1] http://www.politico.eu/article/german-tourists-prank-trigger... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States... |