Public security as “everyone's concern”? beginnings and developments of a useful misunderstanding

Abstract

There is no such thing as a “French model” of policing. Instead, there is a history of police centralization, which largely determines how urban security policies have been implemented in France during the last twenty years. This article shows how the French Interior Ministry, with or against other ministries, has put a claim on meeting the increasing demand for the protection of people and their property. While public authorities have easily succeeded in bringing the development of the market for protection under control, they face a tougher challenge from mayors who wish to take the production of urban security into their own hands. This is where the major political stakes are: avoiding the threat of police “municipalization”, which the state views, rightly or wrongly, as historical regression. While symbolic reassurance is given to civil society, the political concessions needed to achieve a sharing of state powers with the mayors are minimal. The analyst does not have to take sides for or against the best possible form of policing, much less to decide whether or not France is going against the flow of the dominant theories on the governance of security. One should merely observe that the margins of autonomy of the “rowers” (private firms and local authorities) remain structurally weak compared to those of “Captain State”.

Keywords:

• France
• Policing
• Policing demand
• Private and public security
• French Ministry of Interior
• Local political powers
• Governance of urban safety

Notes

Correspondence to: Frédéric Ocqueteau, Centre d'études et de recherches en science administrative/CNRS, 10, rue Thénard, 75005 Paris, France. E‐mail: [email protected].

Cf. Begag (2002), on the necessity of getting out of the ghettoized suburbs to become free of the pressure from the community and blend in with the French citizenry.

For example, within the network of cities in the Urban Security Forum or on behalf of innumerable social workers in associations.

How do we assess passive sexual soliciting, when the notion of active soliciting, already difficult to deal with, has always constituted a carte blanche given discretionately to police to obtain from interested parties a great deal of other information of a completely different nature?

On the dramatization of issues of itinerant delinquency from nomads, cf. Pichon (2002).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frédéric Ocqueteau

Correspondence to: Frédéric Ocqueteau, Centre d'études et de recherches en science administrative/CNRS, 10, rue Thénard, 75005 Paris, France. E‐mail: [email protected].