1,835 additional police and gendarmes on the ground, creation of specialized units in eight large cities and 37 brigades in smaller towns in the provinces… In an interview granted 20 minutes this Wednesday, the Minister of the Interior unveils several measures taken to fight against crime in public transport. Assaults, thefts… All offenses committed on buses, trains, metros or trams and recorded by the police are down, further details Gérald Darmanin.
This does not prevent Place Beauvau from now preparing for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, and anticipating the massive arrival of spectators from all over the world who will use public transport during the competition. “We are going to develop a whole transport security service, set up police stations in stations to facilitate the taking of complaints,” he announced in particular.
Last year, the police and gendarmerie services recorded a 4% increase in thefts and violence in public transport. What about since?
We had indeed observed an increase, in general, in violence against people, in particular in transport. For the past two years, 200 additional police officers have therefore been deployed and we have asked the police, both the CRS, the mobile gendarmes and the police officers of the police stations, to go down in the metro, to go on the buses, the trams …
This system was effective since, over the first ten months of the year, an 8% drop in violence in public transport was recorded throughout France. It is even 18% if we compare the months of September and October 2021 and 2022. In the Rhône, this drop reaches 50%; in Paris, it is 26%; in Seine-Saint-Denis, 22%. All indicators, including thefts and sexual assaults, are down.
Do you intend to step up measures to combat this delinquency?
With Clément Beaune, Minister Delegate in charge of Transport, we are going, between now and the Olympic Games, to more than double the number of police forces in public transport, particularly in large cities, because that is where the we borrow them the most. 10% of French people use them daily to get around, it’s even 25% in Ile-de-France. We are going to go from 1,675 police and gendarmes who patrol public transport to 3,510. Or 1,835 more, including 200 in Paris alone. It is an unprecedented effort.
We will also create new units. Today, only Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Lille have dedicated public transport services. There will be in eight other large cities – Bordeaux, Rennes, Orleans, Rouen, Strasbourg, Dijon, Nantes and Toulouse – with 60 to 90 police officers assigned to each of these units. Finally, in smaller cities such as Angers, Amiens or Lens, 37 brigades of 10 to 20 agents will be set up.
The figures for recent years highlight an overrepresentation of foreigners among the victims. Will a specific system be put in place, in particular with the hosting of the Olympic Games in 2024?
I asked the prefects of the departments concerned to give me, before the end of the month, proposals to achieve zero crime during the Olympics. There is obviously a public transport component, particularly in Ile-de-France. Foreign police officers will come to help their French counterparts, if only to inform people who take transport.
We are going to develop a whole transport security service, set up police stations in stations to make it easier to take complaints. Reinforcements and the creation of specialized brigades will also allow the police to patrol, both in stations and within public transport itself. Until now, the teams were divided, which lost efficiency.
Were lessons learned after the events at the Stade de France, during the final of the Football Champions League?
400 additional police officers are now deployed at each event to specifically fight crime. There have been no incidents since. Two days before, we begin to saturate the public space as soon as the public transport exits – the RER B and D and line 13 of the metro. Our strategy is to do a lot of work upstream with checks on the previous days, an on-site presence, so that on D-Day, the public space is “cleaned” – there is no other word – of any delinquency.
Will specific measures be put in place to reassure women who use transport?
Three months ago we launched a free application called MySecurity. This is the new 17. It allows users, especially women, who assist or are victims of aggression, to chat with a police officer or a gendarme, day or night. They can, for example, report a problem on a metro line and specify that it will arrive at a certain station within 10 minutes. But this application is not very well known yet, we are going to make it so.
Thanks to the law we have passed, it will also be possible to use this application to file a complaint online. It may concern all acts of delinquency, in particular an assault. A police officer or gendarme will then contact the person again within 24 hours. The idea is that our fellow citizens need less and less to go to the police station, and that the police and gendarmes move towards them more and more.
In your opinion, should we continue to develop new technologies to fight crime in public transport?
We can only encourage local authorities to install CCTV cameras and to use the fund provided for this purpose to finance them. In Paris, with the prefect of police, we are going to considerably increase the number of cameras, especially near public transport.