Nimes

FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE – The shootings that killed a ten-year-old child and then an eighteen-year-old young man in Nîmes are the consequence of the war between territories caused by drug trafficking, analyzes the doctor of public law Laurent Lemasson.

Laurent Lemasson has a doctorate in public law and political science.

Monday evening, in the “sensitive neighborhood” of Pissevin, in Nîmes, a 10-year-old child was killed and his uncle seriously injured in a Kalashnikov shooting. If the perpetrators of this murder have not yet been arrested, there is practically no doubt that this shooting is linked to the drug trafficking which plagues the neighborhood. This very day, at three o’clock in the morning, a young man of eighteen was shot dead in this same neighborhood near a deal point.

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Settlements of scores between drug sellers have unfortunately become commonplace in France. In May of this year, there were already more than seventy victims, which is a minimum, bearing in mind that it is not always easy to establish whether such and such a murder is linked to drug trafficking or other criminal activities.

But this Monday the victims were simple passers-by and not individuals linked to trafficking, like the man killed last night. This death of an innocent child, which shocked all of France, should convince us, if it hasn’t already been done, that the reaction of shrugging our shoulders when drug dealers kill each other while saying “good riddance” is a tragic mistake. The violence engendered by drugs cannot remain confined to the criminals who profit from them. Inevitably, it overflows into the public space and ends up reaching, step by step, all those who have the misfortune to find themselves near the scene of the traffic.

Drug trafficking inevitably generates wars for control of the portion of public space where transactions are concentrated.

Laurent Lemasson

The drug trade has the particularity of naturally tending towards concentration: buyers tend to come where they expect sellers to group together, and sellers tend to come where they expect them to that buyers come together. This increases the probability of quickly finding a partner for the transaction and reduces the risk of arrest, which tends to be lower for any illicit activity when the frequency of this activity is higher: the attention of law enforcement is distributed over a larger number of possible targets.

A drug market is therefore a kind of “focal point”: a place towards which sellers and consumers of drugs will converge, including from very far away, once this market has reached a certain critical level of activity. For criminals, the control of commercialization is inseparable from the control of territory and, consequently, drug trafficking inevitably generates wars for control of the portion of public space where transactions are concentrated. The dealers will quickly be armed and the violence will be all the more deadly as they are generally very young and impulsive individuals (of the 73 killed in the first five months of this year, 60% were under 25 years old ) and that the profits from trafficking allow them access to firearms that they do not know how to use.

What happened in Nîmes on Monday is usual in certain cities in the United States, where access to weapons is much easier than in France: regularly innocent passers-by are mowed down by bursts of automatic weapons from traffickers, who shoot almost at random from their car.

The operations to dismantle deal points can only be a success if they result in a real reappropriation of public space, both by the police and by the inhabitants of the district.

Laurent Lemasson

The public authorities are therefore right to focus their efforts on dismantling deal points. Open-air drug markets are indeed extremely harmful. Not only do they engender incivility and violence, but in addition they are, for the inhabitants of the district, a tangible, daily manifestation of the impotence of the authorities and therefore contribute to creating and maintaining a culture of omerta which then makes the investigations all the more difficult, thus creating a vicious circle that is very hard to break once it is well established.

For the same reasons, the consumption of drugs in the public space should be particularly hunted down and punished. However, experience proves that it is indeed possible to permanently dismantle the open-air drug markets and drive trafficking underground. This has been demonstrated many times in the United States, in “High Point” type operations (named after the city in North Carolina where this type of operation was implemented for the first time).

However, these operations to dismantle deal points can only be a success if they result in a real reappropriation of public space, both by the police and by the inhabitants of the district, both being moreover intimately linked. Otherwise, the market recovers very quickly once the forces of order leave.

The riots which shook our country at the end of June clearly showed the extent to which the “republican reconquest” of neighborhoods is a pure slogan.

Laurent Lemasson

However, in France, the “sensitive neighborhoods” which are today the hubs of drug trafficking are much more closed and impervious to the action of the public authorities than the neighborhoods of American cities in which operations of the “High Point ” took place. In France, these so-called urban policy districts have, for some, become veritable “citadels of crime“, according to the expression of Michel Aubouin.

The riots that shook our country at the end of June, even more violent and destructive than those of 2005, clearly showed, for those who doubted it, to what extent the “republican reconquest” of neighborhoods is a pure slogan, devoid of reality. More than ever, the public space there is under the control of delinquents and criminals of all kinds. Everyone remembers this emblematic scene from the film “Bac Nord” where the police receive an order from their superiors not to pursue a stolen car which has just entered a “sensitive area”.

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It is wrong to claim, as we often hear, that the “war on drugs” would be lost and that we would just have to give up and legalize one drug after another. But in France, certainly, this so necessary fight is badly started.

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