How French local police departments take part in urban policing

Résumé 0

In the three large French cities we study here, local police departments (PD) are ordered by municipal authorities to handle two main tasks, i.e. containing of illicit street economy and controlling the urban outcast. In the meantime, local PD devolve ever more the issue of parking disturbances to non-police officers (the ASVP). Despite this common point, these forces differ regarding how prone they are to respond to 911 calls (the appels 17, directed primarily not to them but to the state police) and to seek to catch offenders in the act. Those features stem from the way each local PD is shaped, but this does not suffice to explain the existing discrepancy. Therefore, we show how the state police takes part in defining the municipal forces’mandate, depending on whether she would rather share its workload with them or keep them away.