The president of the National Rally deplores the insecurity in France, after the attack on an elderly woman and her granddaughter in Bordeaux.
“We live in a country where there is a gratuitous attack every 44 seconds”denounced Jordan Bardella on Tuesday June 20 on European 1 , the day after the broadcast of a video showing the violent attack on a grandmother and her granddaughter in Bordeaux. Assaults “from people who are systematically the same, that is to say generally known to the police”, continued the president of the National Rally. Is he telling the truth?
One victim “every 44 seconds”
Jordan Bardella uses here a figure often summoned by the far right, in particular by the candidate of his party Marine Le Pen during the presidential campaign of 2022. This figure does indeed exist, but the presentation which is thus made of it is too vague even misleading. It comes from the Living environment and security survey, carried out by INSEE for the year 2018. According to it, 710,000 people say they have been the victim of an attack during the year 2018. If we spread this figure over 365 days, that’s a new victim every 44 seconds. A figure which has experienced a seesaw evolution in recent years (887,000 in 2008, 695,000 in 2010), but which is tending to decrease.
Nevertheless, this figure speaks of victims and not of aggressions because it is possible that several people were victims of the same aggression, the total number of facts would be lower than the number of victims. In fact, the INSEE study does not really make it possible to count the aggressions but rather to count the victims.
In the same way, it does not make it possible to say whether these attacks were “free” or not, contrary to what the president of the National Rally asserts, since there is a lack of information on what exactly happened, on the context. Moreover, the study does not provide any information on the antecedents of the aggressors, so it also does not allow to say that they are “systematically the same” nor that they are “generally known to the police”.
An attack every minute and a half, according to the police
The only other figures on assaults that exist are those of law enforcement. These figures speaking only of the facts observed by the authorities, they do not represent an overall view of attacks in France, especially since, according to the INSEE survey, only one in four victims files a complaint. According to figures from the statistics service of the Ministry of the Interior, there were 240,200 attacks in 2018, three times less than the number of victims reported by INSEE. By applying the same calculation, that makes an attack every minute and a half.
As for the profile of convicted aggressors, the only thing that can be said is that, according to Insee, 40% of people convicted of intentional violence in 2019 had already been convicted of an offense before.