[ENGLISH] Data Sources that Complement and Enhance Each Other
The statistics produced by the SSMSI are based on two pillars which complement and enhance each other: administrative data and ‘victim’survey results.
A) ‘Administrative data’: As part of their judicial activities, the police and gendarmerie services draw up procedures relating to offences before submitting them to judicial authorities, which may subsequently modify them. Analysing this data makes it possible to monitor security changes in France over time. They provide detailed information about the location and dates of offences, characteristics of the reported victims and those of the alleged perpetrators. Such offences may have been recorded further to a complaint, a report, a witness statement, a flagrant offence, a denunciation or even at the initiative of security forces.
From 1972, security authorities (police and gendarmerie) adopted a standardised tool for measuring their services’ judicial activity based on monthly sums, called ‘État 4001’. Further to this ‘historic État 4001’, procedures recorded by the French national police and gendarmerie since 2016 provide detailed data on recorded offences, their victims and corresponding defendants. Therefore, the Ministerial Statistical Department for Internal Security (SSMSI) constitutes statistical databases relating to recorded offences, their victims and corresponding defendants.
Administrative data arises from a management process, which means that these databases are always likely to be impacted by changes in management rules or recording tools. Such administrative declarations do not provide the SSMSI with information that can be disseminated to the public directly. The statistician still has a lot of work to do downstream in order to be able to use such data because they cannot be used as they are (duplicates must be corrected, missing data must be added, consistency between police and gendarmerie tools must be ensured, statistical units must be determined, etc.).
The SSMSI therefore formats and brings the data up to statistical quality standards. This replaces original formatting and compliance with administrative standards. The databases constituted in this way are documented and can be used to develop statistics whose methodology is set and whose outputs can be reproduced by a third party.
- Historic État 4001
- Offences Statistical Database
- Victims Statistical Database
- Defendants Statistical Database
B) The results of‘victim’ surveys. These surveys collect information from households and respondents on various factors such as the injuries suffered, behaviour reported to the police and gendarmerie, perceptions of insecurity and satisfaction with the actions taken by security and judicial authorities. Regarding victim surveys, the SSMSI conducted the European Gender and Security Survey (GENESE) on gender-based violence in 2021. Since 2022, the SSMSI has been conducting the survey on Security Experiences and Perceptions (VRS) with a large sample of 200,000 people, aged 18 and over, in mainland France, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Réunion. It is a system piloted as part of a broad consultation. With the support of INSEE, the SSMSI has designed an innovative multi-modal protocol (internet, telephone, paper) as part of the overhaul of the Living Environment and Security survey [1] .
Statistical victim surveys make it possible to add information to the crime incidents recorded by the police and gendarmerie because victims of crimes do not always file a complaint. Therefore, the systematic use of victim surveys for these statistics from authority activities constitutes an essential addition to understanding all the factors, both cyclical and structural, which characterise criminal behaviours.
[1] The Living Environment and Security (CVS) survey, carried out annually from 2007 to 2019 and in 2021 by INSEE in partnership with the National Observatory of Delinquency and Penal Responses (ONDRP, abolished at the end of 2020) and the SSMSI (created in 2014), aimed to assess and describe victims of crimes (burglaries, thefts, acts of vandalism, physical and sexual assaults, in particular) and to collect their perceptions about insecurity. It was conducted on a sample population of 25,000 households.