Less red tape as more police go on patrol
Extra police officers are to be assigned to selected areas with high crime levels
The change is part of the first steps to creating the Police de Sécurité du Quotidien (PSQ) – ‘everyday security police’ – who will spend more time on the street and less on red tape.
By 2020, there will be 15-30 extra Police Nationale officers in each of 60 quartiers difficiles in cities and up to an extra 500 gendarmes for 20 departments, in a move away from what some saw as a force of repression.
Police will be asked to build links with residents and politicians and gendarmes to create more of the ‘contact brigades’, launched last year, with the aim of spending more time ‘on the ground’, using tablet computers, rather than in the office.
President Macron promised 10,000 more officers in his election campaign and they will be backed with new technology with 110,000 tablets and smartphones for police and gendarmes by 2020 while 10,000 officers will wear lapel cameras.
Police will have less red tape and fewer non-essential tasks and the government said police success will be evaluated more on the public’s views and less on figures. Though there are similarities, it insists PSQ is not a return to the police de proximité, a strategy abandoned in 2003.
The CFDT union’s police section said the measures correspond to expectations of police in the areas concerned, who had “felt abandoned”.
However, they said numbers may not be enough to eradicate a ‘hard-core’ of crime in certain districts, based on drug trafficking networks who control certain quartiers.
New Interior Ministry figures show burglaries rose by 2% in 2017, with large cities being the worst hit. Regions most affected by rises include Paca, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Brittany and Corsica.
