• The settling of accounts under drug trafficking is linked in Marseille in a dynamic unprecedented for nearly five years.

  • With each new series, elected officials and politicians go there with their proposal and indignation.

  • Repeated proposals that mask a certain political powerlessness.

"For the time being we are undergoing, we are making the findings", already regretted Eric Arella, the director of the judicial police of the southern zone, in mid-July when five settling of scores had been linked in Marseille in the space of 15 days. A sinister trend that continues in this bloody Marseille summer. Since that date, 7 new observations of deaths in very probable settling of accounts under drug trafficking have been carried out, bringing to 15 since the beginning of the year, according to the count of the prefecture, the victims of this war between gangs of drug traffickers. Other accounts show 21 deaths, underlines

La Provence

, a figure which does not also consider the collateral victims and the injured, sometimes very young.

This evening a "young person" sends me the video of the kidnapping at the foot of the building, of one of the "victims" of settling accounts in #Marseille.

I share it, to make the authorities aware of the degree of violence in our city.

pic.twitter.com/PcoyNoansj

- Hassen Hammou (@HammouHassen) August 22, 2021

With each "outbreak of fever", when extreme violence is exposed, new proposals arise.

Repeated reactions which, in many respects, materialize the powerlessness of elected officials and political power to act.

However, the latter cannot remain silent, at the risk of appearing lax, little concerned, or of seeing others occupy the media.

So following the three deaths this weekend, Benoît Payan, the PS mayor of Marseille, drew at the microphone of

France Info

the idea of ​​"a special prosecutor's office in Marseille".

"Anything big" and "ad effects"

An outing that would make a Marseille penalist, a fine connoisseur of this environment, smile if the subject was not so serious. "It is big nonsense" and "effects of announcements", he criticizes. “There are already the JIRS (Specialized interregional jurisdiction, Editor's note). What are we going to do ? JIRS ​​++? ”He asks in a rhetorical question. “They already have colossal means. Judges and police officers do an exceptional job. The 7th chamber of Marseille does not give a gift, it knocks. We cannot speak of laxity ”. The Marseille PJ elucidates about one out of two settlements, an efficiency higher than the national average.

With an already strong and relatively effective penal response, appears the proposal to put more police on the ground, if not the army, as had already demanded Samia Ghali, then senator, almost 10 years ago. This authoritarian and security axiom, the current deputy mayor repeats in a column published in

Liberation

. “Today, like yesterday, my diagnosis remains the same: the State must intervene to secure our neighborhoods,” she wrote.

Environmentalists also went there with their proposal through Sébastien Barles, deputy mayor of Benoît Payan and member of EELV.

With a well-known and often repeated position which had already been taken out after the “feverish surge” of mid-July: “the legalization of cannabis to break the spiral of violence”.

Proposal that makes people smile in police circles.

The State meanwhile, through its Minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmanin, multiplies the declarations with martial intonations.

With "an anti-drug check every two hours", the Minister of the Interior estimated on August 15 in the columns of

Le Figaro

, to have "won a battle".

He also promised 300 new police officers for Marseille in three years.

81 of them have already arrived.

Elected officials and political power are not unaware that the problem is global

Naturally, elected officials and political power are not unaware that the problem is global: societal, economic, affecting housing, education and inequalities.

But they seem incapable of being able to answer it other than those enumerated above.

To start with finding other answers than those proposed “penal-security” and breaking these socio-economic ghettos where the trafficking and the outlets of narcotics flourish and are organized.

Otherwise these trumpeted "battles against drugs" remain a work of Sisyphus.

What to doubt the proposals which will be contained in the "a great secret plan" for Marseilles which would be prepared at the Elysee Palace.

Marseilles

Marseille: Not necessarily a link, but "a common core" to the series of settling of scores

  • Benoît Payan

  • Federal police

  • Gerald Darmanin

  • Drug traffic

  • Various facts Marseille

  • Marseilles

  • Reckoning

  • Society