Paris police authorities “systematically” wiped tens of thousands of crimes from their books as part of a decade-long cover up to make the capital seem safer than it was, according to “explosive” new government data released Monday, reports The Telegraph.
Some 16,000 criminal acts were airbrushed from police books solely for 2011 alone, according to data published in an audit of crime figures for Paris.
Manuel Valls, the Socialist interior minister, ordered the report in September 2012 to investigate how crimes were registered in the Paris area.
The authors uncovered a system in place for the past decade in which the number of crimes was consistently played down. They said the cover up took off in earnest in 2008 - a year after Nicolas Sarkozy, the former Right-wing president, was sworn into office for a five-year term.
From then on, such practices were “organised, systematic” and “masterminded” by police superiors, the report found.
Techniques for cooking the books included dressing up thefts as simple “vandalism”, consistently putting off registering crimes or simply striking them off the register.
In this way, 16,000 crimes were wiped from the books in 2011 and 13,000 in 2012, Paris police said in a statement today. At the height of the book cooking, Paris’ police force was run by Michel Gaudin, a Sarkozy loyalist. Before becoming president Mr Sarkozy gained huge popularity as France’s interior minister and “top cop”, taking a tough stance on crime - a key electoral issue - and linking police pay to success in fighting crime.
Emmanuel Roux, secretary general of France’s top police chief union, suggested politics was to blame for the cover up. “Heads of [police] rarely act on their own initiative,” he told AFP, which has seen the report.
The new data followed a report last year by the public sector auditor, IGA, which found that almost 130,000 criminal acts had “disappeared” from police books on a national level between 2007 and 2012.
Mr Valls has long accused the former right-wing government of playing down crime figures and called for greater transparency.
However, the report found that the cover up continued even after the socialists took power in 2012, right up until last summer.
“It appears difficult for some people to break with habits in place for years,” one senior police source told AFP.
Read more of this report from The Telegraph.