International Journal on Criminology Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2013 | Page 52

Competition Between Those Involved in Public Debate on Crime Statistics
It is in this context that the ONDRP had to deal with, or one might say, face up to,
these two protagonists while also ensuring it carried out its role as distributer of statistical
information and, therefore, ultimately as a contributor to public debate.
Nowadays, the ONDRP attracts attention, in particular from people who, logically,
are outside of the process of designing, collecting, processing, analyzing, and producing
data and are therefore not at the centre of interactions, struggles of influence or in more
mundane terms, means of cooperation with data producing services. It therefore seemed
useful to us, its main partners, to offer a theoretical framework capable of explaining
certain episodes which have taken place since its creation.
Concerned about transparency, the ONDRP has always preferred to say that in
statistics, it is important to realize that its work is subjective and that this is an inherent
part of work on figures, rather than deluding oneself with the illusion of remaining
objective.
Accepting that this work is subjective means that we make a distinction between the
choices which can be made in a mathematical way and those which are partly, and
necessarily, discretional.
This margin for manoeuvre is not usually updated in publications on statistics: the
ONDRP has taken on the duty of exposing it as clearly as possible. They explain their
choices in a detailed way, by specifying the degree to which they are subjective. In
particular, it is a question of reminding people that the options which are chosen are not
always the only possibilities.
Following the same principle of transparency, we suggest a thorough re-reading of
events which needs to be both well-structured in terms of argument, and documented, but
which never is considered as the only possible interpretation. It is a question of trying to
remain convincing, despite the handicap of the absence of distance from the object of
analysis. Furthermore, it would not make sense that only those who are outside the
process, and therefore also without practical knowledge of the work carried out, are the
only ones able to express themselves.
In this particular case, this article does not intend to deal with issues raised by the
mechanisms for producing knowledge of an organization such as the ONDRP. It does not
focus on relations between the ONDRP and the media either. Instead, it aims for an
approach where two partners use each other mutually or use, via the main administration,
methodology advocated by the ONDRP.
It puts forward, with two concrete examples, a demonstration of difficulties for a
new service of studies to impose itself in public debate. It is faced with two categories of
different organizations: sociologists, from the centre of sociological research on law and
institutions working on criminal issues (the CESDIP) at the heart of the first national
victimization study which considers itself as having the monopoly over statistical
interpretation, in this field, and the administration which took over almost all the
institutional communication on the état 4001, tool for recording crimes and offences
recorded by the police and national gendarmerie.
Statistics as part of public debate
All those who participate in public debate regarding statistics on criminality and
crime can remark that there is strong competition between themselves and other
participants in terms of production, access, interpretation, and use. This is what Jean
Marie Delarue mentioned, at the debate evening organized by the French statistics
society, when he discussed “development of the right to competition” (Delarue 2006).
When we hear the term “public debate” we think of places where exchanges take
place, with a comparison of ideas or interaction between individuals during which each
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