This is an important development in the space of two years, which highlights important failings of society.
According to figures released this Friday by the Ministry of the Interior, crimes and offenses of a racist, xenophobic and anti-religious nature reported to law enforcement increased by 13% in 2021 compared to 2019. The ministry's statistics service chose 2019 as the reference year, the data for 2020 having been distorted by the health crisis and the successive confinements.
Police and gendarmes recorded, in 2021, 6,300 crimes or offenses (+ 13%) and 6,200 tickets (+ 26% compared to 2019) of a racist nature, designating acts committed "due to ethnicity, nation, so-called race or religion".
The study does not give details of the facts relating to anti-Christian, anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic acts.
Four times out of five, these offenses consist of insults, provocations or public defamation.
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This study cannot be done without an obvious bias, that caused by the absence of systematic reporting, far from it.
These data thus represent “only a small part of the racist facts suffered” by the victims, underlines Beauvau.
Women and seniors particularly represented among authors
According to the 2019 "Living Environment and Security" survey, 1.2 million people reported being victims of racist attacks in 2018. Between 2013 and 2018, only a quarter of victims of racist threats or physical violence and 5 % of victims of racist insults have, on average, said they have filed a complaint, according to this study.
The victims of racist crimes and offenses (5,720) are mainly men aged 25 to 54, with an over-representation of foreigners from an African country.
The perpetrators (2,125) on the other hand have "characteristics much closer to the general population", with fewer foreigners, more women and older people (55 years and over) compared to the average for other crimes, emphasizes the Ministry of the Interior.
As a proportion of the population, more victims file a complaint in the north and east of metropolitan France than in the west, the Massif Central and the Overseas Territories (excluding Guadeloupe and Mayotte).