Cherbourg, Aurillac… The secrets of the safest cities in France

by time news

An article from the special issue of L’Express “Find the city that suits you”

The statistics of the Ministry of the Interior are formal. In the peaceful agglomeration of Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, there are barely 2.5 assaults and injuries per 1,000 inhabitants, compared to 5.4 in Lille, Nice or Marseille. And demography does not explain everything since the Manche sub-prefecture does better than less populated territories.

It is that we find in the Cotentin a combination of favorable and all converging factors. “Being on a peninsula protects us: we stay away from major crime networks”, recognizes Benoît Arrivé, the mayor (PS) of the town of some 77,000 inhabitants. The unemployment rate is also significantly lower than the national average. “We are generally spared from serious crime and are above all confronted with intra-family violence, underlines David Margueritte, the president (LR) of the agglomeration. This is why we are carrying out prevention work, in close connection with associations of assistance to victims, in order to act upstream as soon as possible.”

It should be added that, by general opinion, there is excellent coordination on the spot between elected officials, justice, the police and actors in the field. “We are a working-class town with a very dense network of associations, says Benoît Arrivé, who himself grew up in one of the city’s working-class districts. They carry out remarkable work with young people in order to make them responsible adults. .”

Relative income equality

The winning recipe? The safest cities in France, whether small or large, often have the same characteristics. Low unemployment rates (Aurillac, Brest, Cherbourg, Le Puy-en-Velay, Pau, Poitiers, Rodez). A dense association network (Angers, Aurillac, Brest, Le Mans, Le Puy-en-Velay, Limoges, Mende, Poitiers, Rodez). Without forgetting a relative equality of income (Angers, Brest, Le Mans, Lorient, Poitiers). Logic. “If you live near areas of great precariousness, the risk of being robbed or attacked is obviously greater”, underlines Sebastian Roché, director of research at the CNRS and specialist in security issues (The Unfinished Nation, Young people face the school and the policeEditions Grasset).

In these municipalities, everything would therefore be for the best in the best of worlds… without this damn feeling of insecurity, which the slightest incident revives. On December 2, 2021, everything seemed calm in the Leclerc center in Cherbourg-en-Cotentin when, suddenly, a man struck two police officers who came to arrest him after a car theft. Terrorism? Major crime? We will learn later that it was not so and that it was in fact an imbalance in rupture of treatment. Nevertheless: in the city, the shock was violent. Same phenomenon on June 22, in the very quiet city of Aurillac, when two rival gangs clashed in broad daylight, against a backdrop of drug trafficking. “It only lasted twenty seconds, there were no injuries, but the psychological effect was disastrous,” recalls Pierre Mathonier, the mayor (PS) of the Cantal prefecture.

What to do in such situations? “We must both react quickly and work on the merits, summarizes the elected official. In this specific case, we have multiplied the patrols in the district concerned to reassure the traders and the populations. And we have continued our substantive work at within a body that brings together the prosecutor, the police, social landlords, associations. It is less spectacular, but it is essential if we want to act in depth. A fine articulation between long time and short time which makes it possible to obtain results, even if it does not make it possible to settle everything. “In Aurillac, recalls the mayor, the population is extremely sensitive to classic crime. However, it causes far fewer deaths and injuries than road accidents.”

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