The year 2021 will go down as a singular year in terms of delinquency. Like everything else, the covid has come to upset the figures and trends. So last year road mortality has never been so low for 10 years. 31 people died on the department’s roads, compared to 43 in 2020, which was nevertheless marked by confinements, and 57 in 2019. But the number of accidents and the number of injuries remains high, and is even rising again compared to 2020. The number of burglaries has also fallen sharply (- 33% compared to 2019), with accommodation rarely empty during periods of teleworking and confinement.
On the other hand, as in many departments, attacks on people increased by 9.8% and domestic violence by 14.7%. Without knowing if the covid has something to do with it, or if the word is finally free on facts that were once hidden. 3/4 of violence against people is suffered within the family sphere. A qualified situation”quite worrying“by the prefect of Charente-Maritime, Nicolas Basselier during the press conference he held on Monday with the prosecutors of La Rochelle and Saintes, as well as the bosses of the police and the gendarmerie in the department, even if there was no feminicide in 2021 in Charente Maritime
Improved care for victims
For the police, domestic violence constitutes an average of 3.5 interventions per day over the fifty in the department. These are 2,200 interventions per month for the gendarmes. They represent 45% of referrals to the parquet floors of Saintes and La Rochelle. A monitoring unit has been set up within the prosecutor’s offices to monitor risky situations and improve the dissemination of information between departments. What Myriam Akkari, the director of public security calls an “ecosystem” or a “bubble” is created around the victim as soon as she is heard in the police stations and the gendarmerie, with the presence of social workers or victim support associations, to prevent them from being alone during the procedure. The gendarmerie has also changed its organization, to facilitate the filing of complaints, and to process cases as a priority. Procedure processing time has halved since 2020. In addition, there are in particular the creation of 5 cells to fight against attacks on persons deployed throughout the department with specially trained personnel to collect the word, a house of trust and protection of families.
6 anti-reconciliation bracelets are active in Charente-Maritime as well as 23 serious danger telephones.