PARIS (AP) – Thousands of French police, who came under fire from bullets, Molotov cocktails and rocks thrown by angry youths in France’s worst civil unrest in decades, will receive bonus pay for their efforts to quell the violence, a top police union official said Friday.

National police chief Michel Gaudin told a conference of police Thursday that about 22,000 officers will receive additional payments of $350 each, according to Jean-Yves Bugelli, assistant secretary general of the Alliance police union.

The three weeks of car burnings, vandalism and clashes between youths and officers erupted in impoverished suburban housing projects that are home to many immigrants and their French-born children.

Police were stretched thin – often clocking overtime hours, working frequent shifts and being asked to hold off on vacations.

As the violence raged, more than 10,000 officers were deployed across the country through the night. Some riot police reinforcements were called in from the French Antilles in the Caribbean.

At least 3,200 suspects were arrested and more than 100 police officers were injured in the violence, France’s worst civil unrest since the student-worker riots of 1968.

A spokesman for the national police did not return several telephone calls Friday from The Associated Press seeking comment about the bonuses.

Word of the payments came as French officials stepped up debate about how best to root out the causes of violence that erupted Oct. 27 after two teenagers were electrocuted in the northern Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois while fleeing what they thought was a police chase.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, visiting the nearby town of Meaux on Friday, said it would be “a mistake” to punish the parents of delinquents without considering “the reality of their problems.”

He was commenting on a measure that Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was expected to submit to the Cabinet as part of a new crime prevention bill, one of the center-right government’s responses to the crisis.

The bill will draw heavily on a parliamentary report on crime prevention, which recommends among other things that the government strip “negligent” parents of some state subsidies, handing control of welfare allocations to social workers.