With the much anticipated Summer Olympic Games fast approaching, and with Macron’s deeply unpopular government scrambling both to ensure the security of international guests and conceal Paris’s visible degeneration, new crime figures show the capital city in a less-than-favorable light and call into question authorities’ ability to keep women safe.
The figures, recorded by Paris Police Headquarters, revealed that 77% of rape cases in the capital solved in 2023 had been committed by perpetrators who do not hold French passports, with the majority of sexual crimes transpiring in and around tourist areas like Champs de Mars—soon to be packed with visitors to the games.
French broadcaster Europe 1, which saw the Paris Police Headquarters report, revealed 97 rapes were recorded across the capital in 2023, a figure up by 2% compared to those from 2022. Before this past year, the number had stayed relatively stable since 2018. Of the total recorded cases, 30 were solved with 36 perpetrators being arrested.
Apart from the fact that the vast majority of perpetrators were not French, most were drug-addicted, homeless, and unemployed, according to the report. Twenty were already known to police, including four for acts of sexual assault.
Grégory Joron, General Secretary of the Unité SGP Police-Force Ouvrière, one of France’s largest police unions, lamented the report’s findings.
That’s still one rape every three days in Paris… This raises a real question since it’s been stable since almost 2018 and overall, we can see that it’s a phenomenon that we can’t manage to extinguish.
For the union chief, the report’s findings are especially worrying in light of the upcoming Olympic games, where Paris is expected to welcome—and maintain the safety and security of— some 15 million visitors.
These are supposed to be places that have 0% delinquency since we are waiting to welcome millions of tourists for the Olympic Games, but, for the moment, these are still places where, unfortunately, we still have a lot of problems on our hands. After a certain time, at night, there is unfortunately still a risk of a woman walking alone to return from a party or even from work.
News of the report from Paris Police Headquarters comes days after Germany’s Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser presented the Federal Criminal Police Office’s (BKA) annual crime statistics report which painted a similar picture of the state of affairs there. Like the figures out of Paris, the BKA’s numbers also revealed foreign passport holders were massively overrepresented among sexual assault suspects at a national level.
Unfortunately, France and Germany are not outliers. The trend has also been recorded in recent years in Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Italy, and elsewhere across Europe.
