“The municipal police must remain under the authority of the mayor” | EUROtoday

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LThe police are the assure of citizen safety. Yes, however which font? French individuals in large cities know that they must take care of the nationwide police and people in rural areas, with the nationwide gendarmerie. The missions of those two parts of the interior safety forces are fairly extensively recognized, however usually confused with these of the municipal police.

Citizens are to not blame: there is no such thing as a definition of the missions of the municipal police. Certainly, a collection of authorized texts has regularly prolonged the scope of what a municipal police pressure can do. The regulation of April 15, 1999, for instance, broadened their repressive prerogatives by together with specifically the id assertion. Generally talking, the legislator, just like the regulatory energy, has gotten into the behavior of relieving the nationwide police and the gendarmerie of missions deemed to be time-consuming and entrusting them to the municipal police.

Who could be happy with this state of affairs? Without abandoning its native mission, the municipal police are given powers which blur the excellence between the motion of the State and that of communities. But this conception reveals a latent undeniable fact that few observers keep in mind: the State's takeover of municipal police forces in recent times.

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Evolution is gradual, however the development is actual, and amplified with the notion of “security continuum”. Behind an expression which will appear technical lies a standard sense thought: the totally different safety forces should work collectively and in a coordinated method to ensure safety. But this raises one other query: who does what? Where does the motion of the municipal police cease? Where does that of the police and gendarmerie start?

Guarantee equal safety for our fellow residents

The 2021 Security Beauvau, a broad session of all gamers within the sector, may have answered these questions. He didn’t do it, as a result of he had one other challenge for the municipal police: that of associating them with the judicial police or administrative police missions of the State, in order to now not have to hold out these missions himself. . This try failed earlier than the evaluate of the constitutional decide.

However, the State may reverse this failure. The elevated judicialization of the facility of municipal cops would quantity to inserting them beneath the authority of the general public prosecutor's workplace, and now not beneath that of mayors. This motion would due to this fact differ from one metropolis to a different. Under these circumstances, how can we assure equal safety for our fellow residents?

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https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/06/03/la-police-municipale-doit-rester-sous-l-autorite-du-maire_6237106_3232.html