Pierre-Marie Sève is director of the Institute for Justice, an association working to reform the justice system and fight crime.
In Nîmes, violence around one of the city's main deal points prompted Mayor Jean-Paul Fournier to close a media library. Yet far from the suburbs of Paris or Marseille, Nîmes is nevertheless completely plagued by drug trafficking. Like an increasing number of medium-sized cities.
It is a well-known fact in criminology: small urban units have a natural tendency to see crime decrease. Thus, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior, the rate of intentional assault and battery throughout the France was 3.9 per 1000,1 inhabitants, but it fluctuated between 9.5 in rural communes and 200 in urban units of 000,2 to 2021 million inhabitants. But for several years, a worrying trend has emerged. The increase in crimes is greater in gendarmerie areas than in police areas. In 9, the Ministry of the Interior noted a worrying increase in aggression in traditionally quieter regions: Brittany (+9.3%), or New Aquitaine (+4.13%), but also in very rural departments such as Dordogne (+2.<>%).
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The result is that medium-sized cities are now as much cutthroats as larger cities. Thus, the list of intentional assault and battery in the cities of France, revealed by Le Figaro last March, counted Saint-Denis or Lille in its top 10, but also Nancy, Caen or Amiens. Traffic drowning medium-sized cities. But the closure of the media library in Nîmes says more than the simple gangrene of violence in medium-sized cities. The violence suffered first by a Swiss pastor mistaken for a police officer, then by an M6 journalist who came to film, is directly related to drug trafficking. For traffickers, it is the territory that allows the profits from the sale of drugs, and this territory is obtained by force.
According to former prefect Michel Aubouin, a truly effective fight on the part of the public authorities can now only be done at the cost of immense efforts.
Pierre-Marie Sève
And precisely these territories are expanding. The whole France is covered with deal points. According to Jérôme Fourquet, there would be 4000 deal points throughout the country, it is only 6 times less than the number of tobacco shops. The sociologist took the example of Ile et Vilaine which is largely supplied by 40 deal points in Rennes, but also in small towns such as Saint-Malo, Vitré, Fougères or Dol-de-Bretagne. And rural areas are not spared: there are 14 deal points in Ardèche, 15 in Indre-et-Loire, 15 in Allier... Solutions are lacking, but also time. The timid attempts to combat trafficking in recent years have consisted of a clever lump sum fine launched by Christophe Castaner, supposed to circumvent the weak judicial response, but it was unfortunately far too insufficient to defeat a traffic estimated at 4 billion euros.
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The evictions of traffickers from their social housing, as in Rilleux-la-Pape, or in Nice must be part of the equation. Just like the fight against international trafficking, vector in particular by Guyana, of increasingly worrying quantities of hard drugs, or the regulation of immigration, a breeding ground from which dealers recruit in priority. But it is urgent. According to former prefect Michel Aubouin, a truly effective fight on the part of the public authorities can now only be done at the cost of immense efforts. Thus, in his book 40 years in the cities, he announces that if the government decides to restore order in the cities, "then the France may tremble, because it will no longer be conventional law enforcement operations but war operations requiring means that we are not sure to have".
