Insecurity and spaces: social distribution and political participation – INSOCPOL

Four databases were used for analysis:
• biennial surveys of the Institute Paris Region provided data pertaining to victimisation affecting individuals or households; fear in public transportation, neighbourhood, home; concerns about social problems (unemployment, health, pollution); neighbourhood trouble. A first move was to describe and evaluate trends in those groups of variables: variations along time appeared as negligible. To validate this first descriptive analysis, we used a multitable analysis on the pooled data of the series of surveys. Insignificant tendencies emerged that affected all spaces in a very similar way, thus supporting the hypothesis of the structural stability of feelings of insecurity over a period of more than 15 years at the level of the Paris Region. It was thus legitimate to pool all surveys in an single database for the upcoming analyses.
• the typology of the Paris Region spaces established by Edmond Préteceille on the basis of the 1999, 2008 and 2013 population censuses provided a double database
o socioprofessional composition
o migration composition
• political behaviour was collected from the results of the presidential, European and regional elections between 1999 and 2019.
One remaining issue was pertaining to the spatial level at which such heterogeneous data could be combined in a single analysis. The submitted project planned to operate at the level of the IRIS (an acronym of ‘aggregated units for statistical information’), but from the victim surveys, the link of respondents to their IRIS was available in only 50 000 cases, which was notably insufficient considering the number of IRISes in the region. The gain in spatial precision would have been lost when regarding statistical reliability.
In the end, the municipal level (or the arrondissement in Paris proper) was retained as the best compromise. However those municipalities with less than 50 respondents in the pooled database were discarded. Located in remote suburbs, and although very numerous, due to their small size, they only gather some 12% of the regional population.
Each municipality was characterized by a single type, reflecting the type of IRIS that gathered the largest number of inhabitants: the small level typology was thus projected on the larger spatial unit.

The complete databases were assembled in a table where each line is a Par-is Region municipality, each column a variable indicating its social composition, migrant composition, victimisation, fears, concern, estimate of neighbourhood atmosphere and election results. The comparison thus covers spaces, not individuals. This table was subjected to a multiple factor analysis followed by a classification that yielded 8 types representing 4 poles: two Parisian poles, one with low crime exposure, the other overvictimised experience no feel-ing of insecurity. In a third pole of re-mote suburbs, although exposure to crime is low, feelings of insecurity are blooming. The fourth pole combines high exposure to crime and fierce feelings of insecurity.
In the typology, indicators of victimization, fears, and concern about crime variously combine across spaces : while exposure to crime depends on localization – it is highest in the capital city and in its adjoining working-class neighbourhoods – feelings of insecurity are more dependent on a dominated social status. Some combinations are logical: upper-class neighbourhoods in the Paris western spaces combine both low victimization and feelings of insecurity; a similarly logical case is that of the neighbourhoods in the close north-east suburbs with an important immigrant population: high crime exposure com-bines with social and economic precariousness and high levels of feelings of insecurity.
Other patterns are counterintuitive: thus the Paris neighbourhoods were a variety of upper-class populations experience both high level of victimisation and no feelings of insecurity to mention. Another unexpected pattern: at the north, east and west margins of the region, where lower-middle or working classes dwell, low exposure to crime does not prevent feelings of insecurity. This reflects a fear of downward social mobility and the wish to differentiate from immigrant working-class; it is manifested by a gradual estrangement from traditional right-wing political parties and a continuous rise, since 2011, of the Front (Rassemblement) national.
Over the period we studied, spaces in the Paris Region have undergone changing characteristics: their social composition has moved upwards. Immigrants’ composition has notably changed too. As to votes, the strengthening of the far-right, the emergence of the ecologists and of macronism has disrupted the right/left duopoly. By contrast, structures of insecurity have remained rather stable, more in any case than the social status or immigrant origin of the populations. Thus, a decidedly spatial analysis sheds light on traits that often remain undercover in individual-centered analysis.

All in all, this research was limited by the impossibility to descend to the infra-municipal level, due to lack of a sufficient number of respondents; the same reason made it impossible to include small municipalities of the rurban parts of the region. Although this double constraint has not prevented our uncovering of a spatial typology of crime-related insecurity, we would like to replicate the approach beyond the sole Paris Region.
Based on the Living Environment and Security (Cadre de vie et sécurité -CVS) surveys (2007-2019), we aim at making the best of the confidential spatial variables recently made available through the deposit by the INSEE of the data-base at the Secure Access Data Center (Centre d’accès sécurisé aux données – CASD). We intend to explore the following questions
• Does the quadripartition observed by INSOCPOL in the Paris Region replicate itself at the national level?
• Do the large regional metropolises present the same characteristics as the Paris region?
• Is there a homogeneous general pat-tern of insecurity in outer suburbs and rural areas?
• Regarding the Paris region, do the nationwide and regional surveys yield the same results? (a comparison that should allow to discriminate between differential effects of the survey instrument and substantial disparities across the spatial units).
This project will add value to unexploited CVS data, by pooling together their geolocated versions. It will enrich this database with Census and electoral data, and make new reusable typologies available to the academic community. It is supported by the positive endorsement by the INSEE and the Statistical Confidentiality Committee (Comité du secret statistique) for access to and processing of the data (scss 3515-1 – point M1139). This research will allow unprecedented study of areas that have never been subjected to quantitative analysis of victimisation and insecurity (regional metropolises, rural areas). Comparison with the Paris region surveys and feedback from the CVS programme will enrich ongoing reflection about future victimisation survey – the most crucial measuring tool of direct victims crime – of which the Ministerial Statistical Service of the Ministry of the Interior (SSMSI) will be in charge from 2022 on. The methodology used is in line with the recent developments of the multivariate analysis of large databases, which combine linear (geometrical) with non-linear (topological) approaches, make use of geocoding and result in factorial, spectral and mapping visualization. It raises the potential for an approach combining multivariate methods and multilevel modelling.

Jardin, A., Préteceille E., Robert Ph., Zauberman R., 2021 Territoires et insécurité en Île-de-France, Déviance et Société 45, 2, 319 55. doi.org/10.3917/ds.452.0121

Is the ‘social question’ re-emerging in the guise of an urban question of risk? To this interrogation, the project intends to respond by analysing, in a large metropolis, the spatial inscriptions of insecurity accord-ing to the socio-professional distribution in urban spaces and to political positions.

Three databases will be mobilised, at the IRIS (small areas akin to census tracts, averaging 3 000 inhabit-ants) level, to reach a fine-grained level of territorial analysis. Relying on victimisation and insecurity sur-veys in the Paris metropolitan region, it will study how crime and victimisation combine in a variety of patterns and will determine their specific spatial distribution. These findings (from the CESDIP) will be cross-analysed with data on the social division of the Paris metropolitan region and the trends thereof (OSC) and with data on political behaviour based on the election results released by the Ministry of the Interior. A comparison of the trends in insecurity, socio-professional distribution and political behaviour across the Paris metropolis over more than15 years (1998-2015) will also be achieved with these databases.

The merging of the data will be completed by their allocation to the IRISes on a mapping database. The next step will be a typological analysis of the data bases thus constituted. Advanced geometric data analysis (Multiple Factor Analysis, Multiple co-Inertia Analysis, STATIS) will be mobilised to circumvent the pitfalls of ecological fallacy occurring in traditional modelling approaches. The use of sophisticated clustering methods (Kernel Regularized Least Square), however, will formalise relations between the ob-served variables. The databases assembled as part of this project as well as the maps matching the polling stations with the IRISes will constitute a perennial output to be disseminated to the scientific community, thus offering many opportunities for future secondary analysis or comparisons at the regional French and at the international levels.

Dissemination of this steadied database will be facilitated by the recently created Observatoire scientifique du crime et de la justice (OSCJ oscj.cesdip.fr/), an academically based monitor of crime and justice based at CESDIP within the framework of ISIS (Interactions Between Science, Innovation and Society), a Paris-Saclay programme.