Guillaume Richard is an LR municipal councilor and metropolitan councilor in Nantes.
A few days ago, two members of a Benedictine religious community, Sister Agathe and Sister Marie-Anne, announced that they were leaving Nantes.
Life in their community and in the Sainte-Croix church, in the heart of the city, becomes unbearable.
Too much madness and too much violence.
Nuns who leave Nantes for reasons of insecurity: the subject is delicate.
Politicians prefer to say nothing.
The mayor of Nantes sends a little-known deputy.
A discreet and clumsy sentence will serve as a press release for the town hall, which thought it had calmed things down last October.
The right, she seizes the subject, denounces, and worries.
Everyone feels that this new "file" can make us forget the marvelous dynamism of our city.
The facts are simple and dramatic: helpers, disinterested, who intervene on a daily basis for the most unfortunate, can no longer carry out their mission.
To help those most in need.
On reading the testimony of Sister Agathe and Sister Marie-Anne, the first feeling is not political.
It's emotion.
What are we to think of a city that fails to retain the best of us?
Those who gave their lives to others, those who accompany people in need on a daily basis.
Sister Agathe and Sister Marie-Anne, in their great kindness, did not detail the profiles of those who are the reason for their departure.
But they retain from these bad encounters,
"people in need of psychiatric support"
.
A polite formula to describe the madness that seizes a man or a woman under the influence of drugs.
When an exceptional event becomes ordinary, it is the signal symptom of a city which must react quickly.
William Richard
Without retracing the history of recent years, we know how much drugs destroy our neighborhoods.
In Nantes as in all the big cities of France.
The working-class neighborhoods organize the traffic when the Place du Commerce distributes.
Sad irony for an activity that rots the daily life of the inhabitants.
And in the last hours of the day, the old Breton streets of the Bouffay district no longer recall much of our history.
They give way to a life disrupted by the many drug addicts who wander in defiance of restaurant and tourism professionals.
And in the midst of it all, nuns in the service of others confess to not having the courage of the Franciscans of the Bronx.
Because they are Catholic nuns, but also because they are women.
So in the city that wants to be the least sexist in France, wouldn't we be able to protect them?
Rue de Solférino, once again, is far from the pragmatism we need to protect women, the first victims of insecurity in Nantes.
Another more alarming remark: the sisters remain convinced that more police will do nothing.
And yet the right demands more armed police and more surveillance cameras.
Aware of the immense delay that we have.
The police, despite their remarkable work, intervene a posteriori to manage isolated episodes.
And often, the violence is too great despite figures which are improving thanks to the municipal opposition which woke up the mayor at the end of 2022 by mobilizing the people of Nantes and the national media.
But when an exceptional event becomes ordinary, it's the symptomatic signal of a city that must react quickly.
There is now a choice to be made.
Do we want to shut down insecurity?
If so, we must commit to the short term, as well as the long term.
The short term: The “broken window” policy.
It seems to be the most serious option, because nothing more should be missed.
In Nantes, it is precisely this risky policy that is responsible for the insecurity we are experiencing.
William Richard
This theory, developed by two famous American criminologists, can be summed up in one sentence:
“If the window of a building is not repaired, all the others will soon be broken”
.
The broken glass policy is a zero tolerance policy.
Because an unrepaired window is the signal that no one is looking, and that no one cares.
The long term: defining a 20-year vision of Nantes.
The common vision of a city and a district is the essential breeding ground for creating social ties between the inhabitants.
It is a long-term vision that makes it possible to successfully develop a territory.
By anticipating town planning, ecology and travel strategies, we curb insecurity.
Because insecurity is the direct corollary of bad city policy.
In Nantes, it is precisely this risky policy that is responsible for the insecurity we are experiencing.
Poorly calibrated city density, poor social mix strategy, abandonment of neighborhoods, successive failures of cultural projects: the city is only held together by the qualities of the people of Nantes who, fortunately, continue to develop their city.
So we ask again, again and again, for a change of course.
But the mayor of the city prefers to appear with the sans-cravats of the Palais Bourbon, proof that her relationship with authority is complicated to say the least.
Read alsoIncrease in physical violence, drop in thefts ... The toll of crime in Nantes in 2022
And yet, she asks for additional means, police, judges and she will say at our next city council that she condemns with the greatest firmness any form of intolerance whatsoever -
Act 1
.
And she will return to her only fight, to make Nantes the ideological experimentation of the rue de Solférino
- Act 2.
Fortunately, many Nantes residents defend and promote their city successfully.
The economic dynamism of our territory is the first proof of this.
Let us therefore hope for a burst of efficiency from the majority, in the service of our fellow citizens who are beginning to get impatient.
