The company announced their new safety measures just last week, alerting residents that in future packages will only be delivered to designated safe pick-up locations.

Chronopost, a subsidiary of the French postal service La Poste, is 73.7 per cent owned by the French government.

The danger to their delivery drivers has become too high to maintain a service in the area, they say. Last year, 51 Chronopost delivery drivers were attacked while on the job.

Laurent Russie, the Communist Party mayor of Seine-Saint-Denis, sharply criticised the company’s decision: “It is totally abnormal that a part of the city so small is no longer delivered to by what I continue to consider as a public service.”

Russie blamed the company for the rise in crime, suggesting “the disappearance of public services leads to insecurity”.

Seine-Saint-Denis has long been described as a no-go zone, but it is the first time that an entire district has been listed as off-limits by the delivery service.

In the past Chronopost had occasionally refused to deliver to certain areas it deemed to be too dangerous.

Seine St Denis, with eighteen crimes per thousand inhabitants tops the list. Followed closely behind, is Les Bouches-du-Rhône, which includes Muslim-dominated Marseille with its thirty deaths by firearm in 2016.

Marseille boasts a similarly unenviable crime rate: eleven acts of violence per thousand inhabitants, the National Observatory of Delinquency and Criminal Responses (ONDRP), led by Christophe Soullez, told Le Figaro.

Postal workers as well as the police in the area are regularly attacked. But Madjid Messaoudene, councilor delegate for equal rights in Saint-Denis, is angry about Chronopost’s decision. “We can not condemn an entire sector because a delivery man has been attacked.”

On January 4, 2017, a driver was “assaulted by three individuals” in Saint-Denis. “Beaten” then “immobilized against a wall”, the driver was severly injured, before being robbed of his goods. Sadly, he was one of at least 51 suffering the same fate.

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