Gerald Darmanin. – NICOLAS MESSYASZ / SIPA
- The Minister of the Interior announced the upcoming entry into force of the fixed fine for the illegal occupation of building halls.
- For the police, this offense created in 2003 is difficult to observe.
- Above all, it risks having a limited effect on drug trafficking because the “lookouts” targeted by Gérald Darmanin are rarely posted in the common areas of the buildings, but at the entrance to the residences.
The days go by and Gérald Darmanin’s announcements in the fight against drug trafficking follow one another. After targeting drug users with the fixed tort fine, the Minister of the Interior now intends to attack the “lookouts”. “In October, the police will be able to impose a fine of 135 euros for a person who occupies a hall of a building. Today, it is very difficult to constitute this offense. It is an additional stone in the garden of the traffickers ”, he explained on Monday on
France Blue Provence. This fine will even be “registered” on their criminal record, he said during a trip to Marseille.
“It’s a good thing, it’s a step forward, even if it is still insufficient to eradicate trafficking. This will perhaps dissuade the youngest, who are taken in hand by the networks ”, judge Denis Jacob, general secretary of the Alternative police union. Often minors, the “chouffes”, as they are nicknamed by the traffickers, are paid to warn them of the arrival of the police in a neighborhood and direct customers to the places of deals. As an accomplice to trafficking, they face a 10-year prison sentence. But it is difficult for the police to stop them. At their sight, the lookouts disperse like a flock of sparrows. And if some are arrested, it is then necessary to characterize the offense, that is to say to prove that their mission was to alert the members of a network.
“It must be clearly established that a suspect is chuffing”
The minister therefore intends to rely on the law of 2003 which created the offense of unlawful occupation of building halls, punishable by imprisonment for two months and a fine of 3,750 euros. But in a ministerial response of December 25, 2012, the Ministry of Justice indicated “that between 2004 and 2011, only a hundred offenses per year could have been the subject of a conviction”. In March 2019, the procedure of the tort fixed fine, which targets the consumers of narcotics, was thus extended to this crime to “give a new effectiveness to this provision, taken by Nicolas Sarkozy, nor has never worked”, notes Yann Bisiou, lecturer in private law and criminal sciences at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. But it had still not entered into force.
The police will be able to rely on the CCTV cameras or the pedestrian cameras that will receive from July all the gendarmes and police, but also on the findings and testimonies, evoking for example the “people who cry because that the police arrive ”, specified Gérald Darmanin. “It must be clearly established that a suspect is chuffing, that’s the difficulty of the exercise,” remarks Denis Jacob. We will have to see in practice how this can be implemented. “
“It’s display”
Yann Bisiou anticipates other difficulties. In the first place, “the fixed fine does not apply to minors. However, lookouts are often less than 18 years old. Then, they are not at the entrance to buildings where there is a deal, but at the entrance to residences. And the offense only targets common areas and roofs. “” It’s display, concludes the academic. There is nothing, and above all nothing new. “