Le proxénétisme et la police : trajectoires, efficacité et logiques de décision policières

The present thesis aims to analyze and explore the management of procuring by the police according to the criminal and police trajectories of people eventually investigated for procuring crimes, the logics of police decisions and the effectiveness of police interventions aiming these people. The thesis analyzes police interventions of which pimps are the object during their trajectory by the quantitative analysis of police data reconstituting the criminal and police trajectories of people eventually targeted in a pimping investigation of a large Canadian city between 2001 and 2014 (n=589).  First, the preferred typological approach consists in dividing trajectories into different classes. It accounts for the diversity of contemporary pimps, a perceptible diversity in the characteristics brought to light by the construction of three groups of trajectories: discrete managers, low-violent polymorphs and quarrelsome overactives. Our results indicate that a minority of pimps stand out for their criminal polymorphism. Second, the study of the logics of police decisions includes the examination of three main registers: the first takes place in a police logic of resolution of a crime where the police officer prioritizes the serious crimes and those which are part of a series, the second arises from profiling based on the cumulative of ethnic appearance, sex and age and the third register takes up a moralizing discourse on prostitution. Time series indicate that, over the years, coercive pimping has gained in importance in investigations over non-coercive pimping. However, survival analyzes show the frequency of crime does not influence the risks of proactive surveillance, but that the average severity score does influence the odds of being targeted for an identity check in a given month. This result is logical: the seriousness of a crime affects surveillance more than its frequency. These results, combined with the important effect of the three socio-demographic characteristics leads us to reject the hypothesis according to which the police force uniformly target their suspects without considering the fact that alleged pimps are criminalized to varying degrees. However, even if police decisions targeting pimps obey a pragmatic logic which leads them to more often check suspects with the most serious criminal records, the fact remains that, for comparable criminality, the distribution of police interventions regarding street checks are not limited to pragmatic considerations.  Third, with regard to the effectiveness of police interventions in deterring the recidivism of alleged pimps, survival analyzes indicate that frequent crime precipitates recidivism, regardless of the type of pimping. In addition, police surveillance has no effect on the likelihood of recidivism. The pimps investigated seem unresponsive to these measures, so while the arrest might be a deterrent, it is not enough to show an effect on the trajectory. In addition, the influence of average severity on the risk of recidivism suggests the presence of a delay in the deterrent effect where pimps come to commit several offenses, so their trajectory accumulates police interventions, for example for violent crimes or for breach of conditions.  Without prostitution, there is no third parties or pimps. This is why in order to understand the place of pimps and third parties in the sex industry, it is essential to address the two main approaches and their vision of prostitution: one perspective frames prostitution as a unrecognized work, and the other one suggests that prostitution is a form of violence against women in a situation to which they have never consented. Although both positions can be defended, this thesis offers a nuanced point of view where questions relating to the criminality of pimps and the influence of the dominant discourse on police practices and their effectiveness are raised.  The thesis concludes with a discussion on the allocation of police resources specializing in the fight against human trafficking and sexual exploitation and their contribution to bringing together safer prostitution conditions.

Keyphrases: prostitution, surveillance, Procuring, Typology, Profiling, Pragmatism, Police investigations, Efficiency