Crime has become a high-profile issue in France in recent weeks. The tone was set by President Emmanuel Macron's new interior minister Gérald Darmanin, who has spoken controversially about the “en-savagement” of a section of French society. The subject now looks set to be a key one in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election with President Macron appearing to follow in the footsteps of former president Nicolas Sarkozy in his crackdown on law and order. Many figures on the Left, meanwhile, are wary of history repeating itself. Eighteen years ago, in the 2002 presidential election, the socialist prime minister and presidential candidate Lionel Jospin infamously failed to make it past the first round, partly as a result of a perceived weakness on the issue of crime. He later conceded that he had fallen into the “law and order trap”; and that despite trying to appear tough on the issue, he had been portrayed as being soft on crime. A much-publicised attack on a pensioner in his seventies just two days before polling in 2002 – the so-called 'Papy Voise' affair - played into the hands of the Right and the ultimate winner of that election, Jacques Chirac.
It was in the context of this ratcheting up of political and media rhetoric over law and order that Mediapart spoke to academic Jacques de Maillard about the fight against crime, how this issue is communicated and the way that the public mood can be manipulated. Jacques de Maillard is a professor of political science at the university of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and at the prestigious higher education institute Sciences-Po Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He is also directer of the research centre into the law and criminal justice institutions, the Centre de Recherches Sociologiques sur le Droit et les Institutions Pénales (CESDIP). He has just co-edited a book with Wesley Skogan 'Policing in France' published by Routledge. He currently works on the relations between the police and the public and on local crime prevention policies.
Mediapart: For how long have crime figures been politicised?
Jacques de Maillard: The change occurred in the 1970s when Michel Poniatowski, who was made interior minister by President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1974 – 1981), said that he wanted to be the minister of law and order for the French people by linking law and order with freedom – the former being a condition of the latter. By then France had become a mass consumer society, an urban society marked by an exodus from the countryside and the relaxing of social and family controls, a society hit by the end of the Trente Glorieuses [editor's note, the 30-year period from 1945 which is often cited as a period of prosperity in France], a rise in unemployment and a rapid growth in petty crime (between 1950 and 1984 the number of thefts multiplied by 11.5, as there were obviously more goods to steal...). At that time the minister of the interior clearly grasped the political advantage of being able to announce a reduction in crime figures.
The sociologist Dominique Monjardet went on to make a good gag out of it in the form of the 'Demonque Theorem' ('Demonque' was his pseudonym) which states: “Over a short period, crime statistics vary in inverse proportion to the popularity of the minister of the interior with the agents in charge of collating data on which they are based.” That was how Charles Pasqua, an interior minister who was very popular with his troops during the two cohabitations [editor's note, when the Right was in government under a president of the Left] of 1986 and 1993 was able to pride himself on a reduction in the crime figures…
Mediapart: Was Lionel Jospin's failure in 2002 partly attributable to 'bad' crime figures?
J.M.: Prime minister Lionel Jospin's credibility was indeed partly at stake over the issue of crime, but the figures are only a part of the explanation (one recalls the consequences of news stories in the media and in particular the well-known 'Papy Voise' affair a few days before the first round). In 2002, with [President] Jacques Chirac re-elected and Nicolas Sarkozy appointed interior minister, the political use of the figures grew and became more radical. It became a key issue, and there was a knock-on effect. Everyone, from the minister down to the police sergeants, even constables, and including the local police chief and the local head of a gendarme unit, had to announce good figures.
Inspired by the police in New York, Nicolas Sarkozy put in place a process to evaluate the forces of law and order, summoning the directors in charge of public security at département [editor's note, similar to a county] level, both those who merited it and those who didn't, congratulating the former and humiliating the latter.
Mediapart: Was there a managerial logic to this?
J.M.: The reasoning was based on aggregate data, annual targets, indicators, performance evaluations and individual bonuses. So the neo-liberal vein is indeed there, but at the same time it has kept a vertical logic that is part of French administration: it is the minister who fixes the targets to put pressure on the services. Also, while in New York the sanction could go as far as losing your job, the minister [in France] has to deal with the protected status of the civil service. Finally, the imported model from across the Atlantic comes up against the absence of any obligation – in the way the minister of the interior drives the changes - to have adequate resources to go along with the police strategies implemented to fight against crime.
Mediapart: Does the politics of figures in the end boil down simply to signals and symbols?
J.M.: The symbolic dimension is indeed strong, but the perverse effects of a political and institutional focus simply on the clear-up rate and crime figures are very real. They have been well-documented in different studies by researchers (1). First of all, when you favour quantity over quality you just keep and showcase what is most easily measured. These are the minor targets within easy reach rather than long-term work: the seizure of six slabs of cannabis thus counts tens times more than the taking down of a trafficking network. The bad cop drives out the good one.
This kind of approach can damage the morale of some police officers while at the same time increasing the cynicism of some others. Tensions within the hierarchy grow with some officers on the ground not happy with the feeling that they are working for the glory of their superiors who are involved in a statistical contest.
Especially as it then becomes more tempting to manipulate the figures in some way. Certain facts disappear in order not to change the curve of the graph, a suspicious levelling creeps in, delays from one month to the next occur, to the point where, given the trickery than they sometimes produce - in all Western countries - researchers have compared the politics of crime figures to the Soviet five-year plans of the past.
This results in unfortunate civic and democratic consequences. Citizens' trust in the institutions collapses. That is the overall cost of short-term political gains.
Mediapart: Yet supporters of politics by numbers depict themselves as champions of transparency...
J.M.: The crime figures are now available every month. That's a good thing as long as the figures are seen for what they are, a snapshot, put into context, and are not exploited for political ends and used endlessly for manipulation, for example to establish too hasty a correlation between a rise in crime and the ineffectiveness of police forces.
As citizens and researchers we need to know what figures we are being told about. The most interesting aren't just those of the crime recorded by the police and gendarmerie. Hence the interest in the victims of crime survey carried out by [the official statistical agency] INSEE which is based on 17,000 people being questioned each year about crime and their perceptions. Yet in 2022 this survey is due to move to the control of the ministerial statistical service for home security, the same body which already publishes the crime figures. Though we don't want to question the ethics of the professional statisticians who will continue to supervise the victim of crime survey, there is here a real issue of continuity. Especially as a survey on this scale raises the question of whether it will be funded in the long time.
Mediapart: Isn't another issue the need to get away from looking solely at law and order, which seems to want to focus just on statistics?
J.M.: One should indeed broaden the indicators beyond just the raw figures, or the simple crime trends and the clear-up rate. In the United Kingdom there are also regular surveys on the relationship between the service users and the police forces, on the quality of a public service that citizens evaluate, in a large-scale satisfaction questionnaire. Each of the 43 police forces in the United Kingdom have user satisfaction surveys. The crime survey [in the UK] is carried out on a very large sample which allows for regional variations. In France the victims survey sample is insufficient, on too small a scale, so that it's not possible to envisage what the inhabitants of the Gironde [editor's note, a département or county in south-west France] experience in terms of law and order in comparison with those in disadvantaged districts in a big metropolitan area.
Mediapart: How should one understand the idea of 'perception of crime' which is both a social construct and a subjective feeling?
J.M.: You have to distinguish between two different aspects: concern and fear. You can worry about crime (and consider that it should be a government priority) without personally feeling the slightest fear. In simple terms that is the case of those who live in west Paris: their level of fear (in their neighbourhood, their home) is low, their concern about crime markedly higher. Equally, you can live with fear of crime (in your home, on public transport) without that being your main concern; for example, when you are faced with unemployment, which becomes more important than anything else.
In the 2000s, which witnessed dramatic actions from the minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy, concern fell but the level of fear remained stable. This produces the risk that those who continue to be alarmed turn their back on those who use too tough a rhetoric without actually freeing them from their anxiety … and responding to their daily problems concerning law and order. This is the risk of the aggressive even warlike rhetoric: suggesting that you will resolve complex problems (drug trafficking in local neighbourhoods) through simple solutions (the massive use of police resources).
Mediapart: What about the fear that the police - rather than crime - provokes among the public?
Enlargement : Illustration 4
J.M.: We measure that by dissatisfaction with the police service. That can be between 20% and 30% of the French public. That's not negligible, and the dissatisfaction is higher than in equivalent Western countries (2). In any case it is – or should be – a failure by the national police if it is regarded as an element of polarisation rather than as resolving law and order issues.
During the the recent 'yellow vest' protests [against the government] we saw over the months a section of the population that is traditionally loyal and doesn't have much interaction with the police - in blunt terms, the white working and middle classes – become dissatisfied. There's a change that needs to be watched carefully. Some surveys show a collapse in trust since the end of 2019.
Mediapart: What responsibility does the mainstream media have?
J.M.: Public opinion appears to be both poorly informed – rarely able to determine if violence is growing or not based on reliable data - and at saturation point. Overwhelmed by a strong emotional component, assailed by reports of sensationalised news stories, the collective mind latches on quite spontaneously to political proposals that play on people's emotions. Recent opinion polls show that's how the supposed notion of 'en-savagement' seems to have taken hold; a majority of the public clearly see some sense in it, even though all serious research shows precisely the opposite. This puts collective emotions at adds with the views of experts, with all the risks inherent in this in a democracy. It's the culmination of the three-way dance that's taken place between the minister of the interior, some major media outlets and the mood of the general public.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) See Jacques de Maillard et Fabien Jobard, Sociologie de la police, Armand Colin, 2015, pp. 214-223.
(2) See Maillard, Gayet, Roché et Zagrodzki : 'Les relations entre la population et les forces de l’ordre. Un état des lieux en France', in Observatoire national de la politique de la ville, Bien vivre dans les quartiers prioritaires. Rapport 2019, pp. 88-121.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The French version of this interview can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter