This article proposes to present the state of affairs of French municipal police forces, and to provide a review of the relevant scientific literature at the moment of the creation of the municipal police of Paris. This municipal police was born in a context of low levels of sense of insecurity, but high levels of different kinds of public nuisance, justifying the focus of its activities on the disturbances of public tranquillity. To keep this focus, one of the major issues is to maintain a clear and complementary share of competences with the forces of the national police. However, our article alerts on some difficulties to do so : according to our estimates on panel data, increasing municipal police force size are on average accompanied by a simultaneous drop in the national police force size on a local level in France, generating a substitution effect. In addition, a series of operational choices – in terms of recruitment, equipment, resource allocation – will impact if the new municipal police can efficiently address the issues of public tranquillity, which also depends on the level of trust and legitimacy recognized by the population.
Mot(s) clé(s)
policing ; municipal police ; public policies ; security ; public tranquillity
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