Porte de la Villette in Paris, loaded with her shopping, Marie* returns home, just opposite the metro. She has lived here since December 2019. “The digital code is broken once a week. I work early in the morning and when I call the elevator, there are drug addicts who are sleeping in it or doing their business, she says. There is insecurity from very early in the morning and in the evening from 8 p.m. The neighborhood is completely abandoned and all my neighbors are leaving.”
Eradicate crack in less than a year in Paris, this is the mission entrusted to the Paris police headquarters. But Mary does not believe it: “The police are in their van parked near the metro and they don’t come out. You can even knock on the window of their van, they don’t answer you, they are on their phones. Nothing is done. is getting worse and worse, day after day. All access to the metro is broken, they have removed all the seats. We absolutely don’t believe it anymore and people are leaving.”
“What is ‘comical’ is that we live next to the police station.”
Marie*, a residentat franceinfo
“I once asked them what we could do. They said, ‘Be careful, ma’am.continues Mary. They also explained to me that if the ‘crackers’ were moved there, it’s because at least the Porte de la Villette, it’s at the end of Paris, and it’s the best solution because nobody wants it.”
In Stalingrad and on the quays of the Bassin de la Villette, around the MK2 cinema, if the evacuation of drug addicts in September 2021 allows residents to breathe, according to several testimonies that we have collected, crack users are starting to return in the evening. . Police pressure drives them out of the Porte de la Villette, explain several associations of residents and drug addicts. This coming and going is what Catherine sees every day: “There have always been some here, even since they left for Pantin and La Villette. In the evening there is a fight. Sometimes, we see traces of blood the next day on the ground.”
This report drawn up by all these residents, the Paris police headquarters hears it, but the new prefect does not “cannot say that this sector is abandoned. I understand the distress of some residents, but I cannot let it be said that we are inactive”defends himself Thursday, September 15 on franceinfo Laurent Nuñez, who succeeded Didier Lallement as Paris police chief in early August.
“Since August 4, we have been deploying nearly 200 police officers daily to this area, obviously aiming to disperse crack users and arrest traffickers.”
Laurent Nuñez, Prefect of Police of Parisat franceinfo
“Obviously that won’t be enough.agreed the prefect. We will have to build a care plan for these people, these consumers, which will obviously call on health, social, psychological and even psychiatric measures to try to get these people out of addiction to crack. This is obviously the ambition of the plan, but at the same time, we must also have repressive police action which is absolutely essential.”
The new prefect organized a new police operation on Place Auguste Baron on Tuesday 13 September. Led by 450 police officers, it made it possible to arrest 113 people, including 70 foreigners in an irregular situation, the others for common law offences. Two people were sent to the psychiatric infirmary of the police headquarters. Since taking office in August, Laurent Nuñez indicates that his services have carried out 385 arrests resulting in 250 police custody which have led to detention for trafficking. The investigators of the Parisian PJ, the police officers of the crack group of the railway network brigade and the police officers of the police stations have handled 300 cases related to crack since the beginning of the year, which made it possible to seize 2.3 kilos of crack and more than 160,000 euros in criminal assets, and to dismantle 14 crack “kitchens”, the laboratories where this drug is manufactured. The work of the investigators finally made it possible to detain 11 “modous”, these Senegalese dealers who are the main suppliers of crack.
This first assessment is drawn up by the prefect of police after a little more than a month in office, while the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin has planned to go to West Africa to “to have a frank dialogue with the countries concerned and to create the conditions for the very rapid return of traffickers to their countries of origin”. “We need to streamline the relationship with a number of authorities in these West African countries to be able to more easily obtain consular passes to enable us to deport these traffickers”, says Laurent Nuñez. The eleven “modous” arrested were placed in CRA [centre de rétention administrative] for reappointment.
*Name has been changed