Pierre-Marie Sève is General Delegate of the Institute for Justice (IPJ), an association of citizens mobilized alongside the victims.
The arrival of mass delinquency in the countryside has definitively tipped France into endemic delinquency, that is to say lasting and incurable with current methods.
Since the end of the post-war boom, France had become accustomed to a simple pattern: delinquency seemed to stop at the gates of towns.
With crime rates 3 to 4 times higher in urbanized departments than in more rural ones, the countryside served as a protected area.
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All the indicators confirm what seems logical: delinquency increases sharply with the size of the urban unit.
As an illustration, the rate of assault and battery in 2019 is 5.3 acts per thousand inhabitants in urban units of more than 100,000 inhabitants, but this rate decreases regularly to reach 1.9 per thousand in rural municipalities.
When the countryside catches up with the city
But, there are serious reasons to believe that this salutary divide between town and country is on the way to being seriously reduced.
The French countryside, whose crime levels had remained much closer to the rates of the 1960s, saw their crime levels increase sharply in almost all the departments in 2020. These are the figures of the Ministry of the Interior: + 8% increase in violence in all gendarmerie areas, and even + 10% in assault and battery.
In order, as of now, to cut short an explanation that is too simple, confinement and its urban exodus cannot be considered as sufficient causes.
Indeed, the statistics of the last years show a continuous increase, for example, of deliberate injuries, and this on all the territory since the year 2013. We are even witnessing an acceleration since 2016: + 8% in 2018, + 8% in 2019. Confinement or not confinement, the trend does not date from this year.
In 1964, the crime rate was 12 felonies per thousand inhabitants, a rate almost five times lower than today
It is because the strong delinquency of the cities has reached the countryside that France is today in a state of endemic delinquency, that is to say that it is constantly brewing and everywhere on the territory.
Now self-sustaining at very high levels, this delinquency seems immune to government policies and, without shock treatment, French society is doomed to remain stuck in this situation.
Today, we could almost forget that France was, until the 1960s, a peaceful and quiet country, both in the cities and in the countryside: in 1964, the crime rate was 12 crimes per thousand inhabitants , a rate nearly five times lower than today.
But from the end of the 1970s, France began a record rise in delinquency, with peaks of 69 crimes and misdemeanors per thousand inhabitants in 1994 and 2002. Since then, a stable and high level of misdemeanors (around 60 for thousand) only varies at the margin, depending on the effects of figures from the Ministers of the Interior.
Numbers don't say it all
Let us add that this stabilization of the delinquency figures does not necessarily mean a stagnation of real delinquency.
Rather, this stabilization at a high level reflects changes in behavior in a population that has become accustomed to living with a high level of delinquency.
The French population has become accustomed to double-closing its doors, to staying on the alert in public transport, to lowering their eyes in the face of aggressive people.
The tension increases, but our new behaviors bypass the confrontations and therefore the statistics.
This is what I explained in my September article published in the FigaroVox: “Insecurity: the figures do not say everything”.
Endemic delinquency is also of a different nature from previous crime.
Its main characteristic is a trend observed for many years: the relative decrease in thefts and other villainous violence, and the parallel increase in so-called gratuitous violence.
Thus, for example, over the long period 1984 to 2000, convictions for theft and receiving stolen goods fell by 33% while convictions for assault and battery increased by 37% and those for sexual assault by 84%.
Clearly, among today's delinquents, fewer apple thieves, more ultra-violent personalities.
You have to get used to this new reality.
In its cities, as in its countryside, France sinks, day after day, in a more diffuse, more violent delinquency, more rooted in our habits and above all, resistant to the treatments of Doctor Beauvau.
Welcome to the era of rampant delinquency.
