Are there 70 refusals to comply per day, as Sébastien Chenu claims?

The vice-president of the National Rally denounced what he calls a “South Americanization” of France after the death of a police officer during a refusal to comply in the Alpes-Maritimes, putting forward slightly overestimated figures.

“Our country is on the way to South Americanization”deplores Sébastien Chenu on Tuesday, August 27, the day after the death of a police officer during a refusal to comply in the Alpes-Maritimes. The vice-president of the National Rally draws up an observation on TF1: “70 refusals to comply per day. It’s a miracle that there aren’t more victims. The reality is that there could be people dying every day as a result of these refusals to comply.” Is this true?

The number of 70 refusals to comply per day given by Sébastien Chenu is not exact, it is a little too high. It comes from an estimate made by the newspaper The Figaro in the first quarter of 2022. At that time, refusals to comply had never been the subject of an official quantified report, the estimate of Figaro had therefore been widely taken up, notably by Cnews.

Since then, the SSMSI, the statistics department of the Ministry of the Interior, published its very first official report on the subject in April 2024, based on declarations from law enforcement agencies. According to it, gendarmes and police officers were confronted with 23,100 refusals to comply in France in 2023. By dividing this number by the number of days in a year, we find that there were actually around 63 refusals to comply per day last year.

This report, which has tracked the number of refusals to comply per year since 2016, shows that this type of traffic offence has tended to decrease in recent years. In 2016, there were 24,400 refusals to comply. This increased until reaching a peak of 27,300 refusals to comply in 2021. This was followed by two years of decline. Finally, in 2023, there were fewer refusals than in 2016.

But not all of these refusals to comply put someone’s life in danger. In 2023, 4,400 refusals to comply exposed a person to a risk of death or permanent disability, these are “aggravated” refusals to comply. That is 12 per day on average. They represented 21% of all refusals to comply recorded.

And they too tend to decrease. They increased from 2016 to 2021, going from 3,800 to 5,500 per year, before falling in 2022 and 2023. But the number of aggravated refusals to comply is decreasing less quickly than the number of refusals to comply that do not put anyone in danger, so, mathematically, the proportion of refusals to comply considered serious is increasing. They represented 16% of all refusals in 2016 compared to more than 20% since 2021.