Posted
Article written by
The sentence of the President of the Republic on the set of France 2 had reacted on October 26. He asserted that delinquency in Paris was, for half of the facts, committed by foreigners. Disputed figures.
On France 2 at the end of October, Emmanuel Macron affirmed that in Paris, “half of the acts of delinquency that we observe come from people who are foreigners either in an irregular situation or awaiting a permit“. A statistic that comes from the prefecture of Paris. 48% of foreigners are implicated, all offenses combined, in intramural Paris between January and June 2022. A figure that must be taken with tweezers. These are people suspected by the police, not convicted.Statistics that can be biased because of racial profiling.
Paris is also not representative of France with more than 14% of foreigners against 7.7% in the rest of France. An indicator favored by certain specialists is the proportion of foreigners sentenced at the national level. According to the Ministry of Justice, 15.3% of convicts in France were foreigners in 2019, despite representing only 8% of the population. This is far from 48%, but it still denotes an overrepresentation. “What will determine the characteristics of delinquency is very much the socio-economic characteristics of individuals. It will be true for foreigners and the French“, moderates Sébastian Roché, political scientist specialized in criminology. In conclusion, the delinquency committed by foreigners is real, but the formulation used by the President is misleading.