Edit of October 29 at 12:30 p.m.: We have added information provided by the Paris police headquarters.
Asked about France 2 in the program The event, Emmanuel Macron returned to the link made between immigration and delinquency, by his Minister of the Interior in particular. In August, Gérald Darmanin declared in an interview with the JDD “that in France, foreigners represent 7.4% of the population and 19% of acts of delinquency. […] It is obvious that we have a problem of foreign delinquency”. The minister is right, defended Emmanuel Macron, he describes “statistics and qualifies facts”.
If the President of the Republic defended himself from any “generalization” and affirmed that he “would not do [t] never an existential link between immigration and insecurity”, he nevertheless shared a statistic on delinquency in Paris.
He explained that: “Yes, when we look at crime in Paris, we cannot fail to see that at least half of the crime that we observe comes from people who are foreigners, or who are in an irregular situation. or pending title. »
Words that have elicited many ironic comments from the far right: “To be able to say almost in the same sentence, as Emmanuel Macron did, that half of the crimes in Paris are committed by foreigners and that there is no link between delinquency and immigration, it had to be done anyway! “, she remarked on Twitter.
FAKE OFF
But this statistic should be qualified. Contacted, the Ministry of the Interior clarified that it was referring to the first six months of the year 2022. According to the Paris police headquarters, “48% of those questioned for acts of delinquency in Paris (all done confused, damage to property and persons) are foreigners” over this period. These foreigners include people in an irregular or regular situation on the territory, adds the ministry. A category a little broader than that given by Emmanuel Macron.
In information sent on October 29 after publication of the article, the Paris police headquarters added that in the first months of 2022 and for certain types of offence, the proportion of foreign defendants is higher than this Average: 70.4% of violent thefts and 75.6% of simple thefts are committed by foreigners in Paris. These data come from the police headquarters and the ministerial statistical service for internal security, the document specifies.
In the Paris conurbation, the trend is “similar”, notes the Paris police headquarters: all offenses combined, the proportion of foreigners implicated amounts to 41%, while it amounts to 57, 8% in thefts committed with violence, and 65.1% in simple thefts.
Point to be clarified: in the big French cities, and particularly in Ile-de-France, the proportion of foreigners is higher. This is also reflected in the number of victims: for example, in public transport in Ile-de-France in 2021, 26% of victims of theft or violence are recorded as foreigners, i.e. almost twice as many as in the rest. of the territory. “This gap can be linked to the share of foreign residents (15% in Île-de-France against 8% in the whole of France) and to tourist attendance”, analyzes Interstats, the service of the Ministry of the Interior in a note published in September.
A partial statistic
For Fabien Jobard, sociologist, research director at the CNRS and assigned to the Center for Sociological Research on Law and Penal Institutions (Cesdip), there is also an “important” element missing in this statistic. “The Ministry of the Interior talks about the defendants, it’s different from delinquency”, he underlines.
Why ? Because a large part of the facts of delinquency (which can be crimes, traffic offenses through the carrying of weapons, domestic violence, characterized insults, cybercrime, etc.) are not prosecuted, he explains. he. The acts of delinquency include all offences, crimes, misdemeanors and contraventions and police statistics do not cover all delinquency or all entry into the prosecution. A graph published in 2019 in the law review Also Penal and accessible on the website of the Ministry of the Interior provides a better understanding of the fields of delinquency and their treatment in France.
A pending question
A question remains, for the time being, unanswered by the Ministry of the Interior or the police headquarters: does this statistic of 48% include offenses revealed by third parties, i.e. complaints, or is it only the defendants for offenses revealed by the action of the police services?
“In the respondents, you have an overrepresentation of police clienteles: that is to say the people that the police will target first, therefore street delinquency, analyzes Fabien Jobard. We know that this crime is essentially committed by men in precarious situations. And foreigners, a fortiori, foreigners in an irregular situation are overrepresented in this population. In addition, offenses against the legislation on foreigners and residence offenses are taken into account. »
What we know about the convictions of foreigners in France
He emphasizes that “the order of proportion has not changed for at least 25 years in France, with a proportion of 7 or 8% of foreigners in the general population, an order of 15% of foreigners among the convicted population and 20% to 25% of foreigners in prison. Why ? Because foreigners are often over-represented among poor populations, yet it is among the poor that we recruit the most acts of delinquency and in particular, and this is important, acts of delinquency on the public highway. There’s what he calls a “funnel effect.”
Moreover, “the judges prefer to put foreigners in prison, because they do not have the same guarantees of representation, he continues. Second dimension, foreigners, among the population of convicts, are those who are most convicted for acts of petty crime, that is to say acts which are motivated in particular by poverty, therefore public delinquency. »
According to an article published on the site of the Institut convergences migrations, affiliated to the CNRS, “in 99.2% of the convictions of persons of foreign nationality, the offenses are misdemeanors – of which more than 55% relate to road traffic and thefts – and in only 0.8% of crimes”.
Finally, according to data from the Ministry of Justice, the proportion of foreigners among all convicted persons varies according to the nature of the offence: 29% in 2019 for driving without a license (30% in 2020), 26% for illegal work in 2019 (25% in 2020), but it reached 47% for forgery in public or private writing in 2019 and 2020 and 71% for transport offenses in 2019 and 2020.