Crime Statistics the French Way

Is Collecting Data Always Good?

If you want to understand how race or ethnicity relates to crime in France, good luck. Official data simply does not exist. According to Race, Crime, and Criminal Justice, “French citizens are not differentiated in terms of race, religion or ethnicity in official census or criminal justice statistics gathered by the Ministry of Justice.”

My initial reaction upon hearing this was to think it was not a good idea. I’m generally against efforts to reduce information. How can you identify problems or track progress without data? How can you address discrimination? While anecdotes may offer glimpses into broader issues, relying on them as a basis for policy is unreliable—you need data to truly understand and address systemic issues.

France's approach isn't an oversight. It's a deliberate policy choice. According to Jean Beaman, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara:

The origins of France not collecting ‘ethnic statistics’ date to the Vichy Regime during World War II. By using racial categories, Jews in France and in French colonies in the Maghreb were rounded up and deported to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Race has ever since been seen as dangerously divisive.¹

This wartime experience crystallized into formal policy with the 1978 Data Protection Act, which effectively banned the collection of racial and ethnic statistics across all government agencies. Here is how it’s described in an article in The Conversation:

The French state’s policy rejects any references to national, racial, ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities. This model is based on the idea that the state should interact with the individual only, not communities or groups, in order to give equal treatment to everyone.

The cons of this approach immediately come to mind. Having less or inaccurate data to answer a question or solve a problem never seems like a good idea. I’ve always said that a good data scientist shouldn’t ever bemoan more data. In the worst case, where the data’s irreparably biased, you can always ignore it, but it shouldn’t ever be bad to have more data. If you’re overwhelmed by the amount of data, get a better data scientist.

Sometimes, problems are only clearly visible in data. For example, systemic discrimination would be hard to show without data. Some minority groups have felt this policy makes the discrimination they face harder to demonstrate, though no less real. According to an article in Harvard International Review, “more than 80% of respondents in a recent poll conducted in Seine-Saint-Denis said they attribute race or ethnicity to the discrimination they face when dealing with police or when seeking employment […] Another study conducted about policing in France revealed that Black and North African youths were far more likely to be stopped and searched by police.” The Conversation article argued that by not collecting these statistics, it “serves to make minorities, and the difficulties they face in French society, almost invisible.”

I’ve been critical of the quality of the public conversation we have around race and gender, but is the conversation so bad that it’s better to suppress it? In France, even the concept of race is considered “taboo”. Nondiscussion hardly seems like a solution.

I don’t see which groups would gain from such a policy. No matter what political viewpoint you hold, presumably, you believe that the data—once all accurately corrected and tabulated—supports whatever viewpoint you hold. It makes sense that people would want to gather data to demonstrate their points.

In addition, how efficacious is this prohibition in practice? Nature abhors a vacuum, and the absence of official statistics doesn't mean people stop asking questions about racial differences in French society. In some cases, it seems that French officials try to get around this by funding academics to do the research instead. But these academics have fewer resources, so the data quality suffers². If there are no official statistics, does that just leave room for unofficial—and quite likely inaccurate—statistics, anecdotes, and gossip to fill the void?

Take, for instance, the widely circulated claim that 70% of France's prison population is Muslim—a figure that, while well-circulated, seems to be inaccurate. If there were official statistics to counter it, the inaccuracy might not have propagated as far.

The Harvard International Review provides more examples:

Additionally, due to the lack of accurate racial data, extreme-right wing politicians have capitalized on the ambiguity, inflating the number of Muslims residing in France and fanning the flames of xenophobic sentiment and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Politicians used such tactics to spread fear about terrorism and mass immigration, two issues at the center of French policy making. More recently, the lack of racial data collection has left citizens of France in the dark about the rates at which people of color are stopped and searched by law enforcement, rates of workplace and housing discrimation, and rates of death due to COVID-19.

It also seems like there would be some sort of Streisand effect, whereby suppressing it, people wonder what the data would show that is so important to suppress.

But are there any pros to France’s prohibition of this type of data collection? If this is a question—like most questions—of tradeoffs, then what are the benefits? Despite the clear drawbacks, could there be subtler advantages that might balance them out? Let’s set aside the practical costs of gathering data and ask whether there’s a broader benefit to not collecting this information at all.

It’s possible that constantly highlighting racial and ethnic disparities can entrench divisions rather than heal them. When every social problem is filtered through the lens of racial statistics, it may shape how society views itself and its challenges. The absence of official data might, paradoxically, create space for addressing problems without immediately casting them as racial issues.

For example, such data will certainly highlight disparities. If you believe that disparities are caused by discrimination, it’s important to highlight them. That’s the first step to eliminating them. But if you believe, as Thomas Sowell does, that disparities are always going to be part of societies, perhaps it’s better not to know? I have to say, this seems like a stretch to me. Though Sowell believed disparities were permanent features of society, I don’t think he ever advocated against collecting data because of it.

In addition, collecting racial and ethnic data necessitates categorizing people into discrete groups, which can lead to oversimplification and inconsistencies. The unclear distinction between race and ethnicity is evident in forms that ask about Hispanic origin separately from race, with only two options: Hispanic and non-Hispanic, a bizarre binary grouping that implies that all non-Hispanics are similar yet different from Hispanics in some important way. Similarly, the term "Asian American and Pacific Islanders" lumps together populations with distinct cultural and historical backgrounds, such as Samoans and Chinese, as if they share a relevant connection. These racial categories can become almost like paper towns—artificial creations sketched out on paper that eventually assume a real and important presence in society. Now we see organizations like “Stop AAPI Hate” emerge in response to anti-Chinese sentiment after COVID-19, although outside of this organization, I’d never heard of anyone linking a Pacific Islander to COVID.

The cons seem concrete while the pros—better society through less focus on disparities—feel tenuous and, to be honest, made up³. While constantly highlighting racial and ethnic differences might in some cases reinforce divisions, there is little concrete evidence that deliberately suppressing data would lead to a more harmonious society.

I’ve been focused on demographic data and its impact on society, but maybe I’m missing the larger point. John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971, was famously skeptical of the government collecting data as well, even refusing to allow GDP to be collected. When asked what key thing poor countries should do to encourage growth, he replied, “They should abolish the office of national statistics.” When Milton Friedman asked about how few statistics Hong Kong collected, Cowperthwaite responded, “If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.’’ During his decade as financial secretary, real wages rose by 50 percent and the portion of the population in acute poverty fell from 50 to 15 percent. However, this begs the question: How would anyone know if such data weren’t collected?

I end up close to where I started: it’s just very hard for me to be opposed to collecting data. I don’t know what would convince me that this is a good idea, but I’ll be on the lookout for more instances of this and try to form a fuller opinion.

1. Germany has a similar policy.

2. See here for many other suggestions of ways France could collect the data while respecting French principles.

3. In fairness, I’m spitballing ideas here, so technically it was just made up.