Local partnerships, strategy of responsabilisation and Internal Police Reform in France

Abstract

Urban security has become a new policy preoccupation in many European cities since the 1980s. City governments throughout Europe have increasingly engaged in the repression of incivilities, the fight against street crime, and actions and measures of securitization and protection. The last 30 years have seen the emergence and institutionalisation of a new urban politics in which public security has become a new policy preoccupation based on several common characteristics: a focus upon pro-active prevention rather than reactive detection; emphasis upon wider social problems, quality of life, anti-social behaviour and disorder; implementation through decentralised, local arrangements for the delivery of these politics; delivery through a partnership approach, drawing together a variety of organisations and
stakeholders in horizontal networks (Crawford, 2014). Mobilising recent research on France on the operational partnership groups created since 2019 (as part of the “day-to-day security police” reform), we identify the main tensions at the heart of these policies: the thwarted strategy of responsibilization by the French central state and the difficult reform of the police nationale.