Is it safe to walk the streets of Paris? Certainly, fewer and fewer Parisians seem to think this way.
An IFOP-Fiducial opinion poll published on the eve of the first round of municipal elections this Sunday showed that public safety had become the main concern of Parisians before the elections.
Eager to play to their traditional strengths, right-wing candidates, including former Culture Minister Rachida Dati, have insisted on the need to take urgent measures to keep the city safe, including massively expanding the city’s network of video surveillance cameras and deploying thousands of armed police officers to the streets of Paris.
Whether or not the figures support the belief that crime rates are rising in the capital is a hotly contested issue. Crime statistics published by the Home Office for 2025 show that robberies and violent robberies continue to decline in the capital, while recorded incidents of sexual assault and violence appear to have increased in line with national trends.
And while more and more surveys reveal that the French are grappling with a growing sense of insecurity, the proportion who actually feel personally unsafe in their own neighborhoods has remained largely stable over the years.
In any case, these concerns will likely be at the forefront of many Parisians’ minds when they vote in the tight race for the city’s new mayor on Sunday.
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What they expect him or her to do about it is another question. The Hôtel de Ville in Paris has many powers, but launching criminal investigations into organized crime or dismantling international drug trafficking networks are not among them.
The national police force in charge of combating major crimes in the capital depends on the Prefecture of Paris, which in turn depends on the French Ministry of the Interior.
As a result, candidates from across the political spectrum have pledged to deploy thousands of officers from the city’s nascent municipal police force.
Far-right candidate Sarah Knafo has called for the number of municipal police patrolling the streets of Paris to almost quadruple to 8,000, while center-right candidate Pierre-Yves Bournazel and Dati are demanding 6,000 and 5,000 respectively.
On the left, which at different times in its history has seen municipal police as an opportunity to put into practice an elusive model of “community policing,” the push for more staff has also found support.
Socialist candidate Emmanuel Grégoire has called for the city’s police force to be increased by 1,000 new members and for 500 new CCTV cameras to be installed across the city. Far-left candidate Sophia Chikirou has also called for just over 1,000 new officers to be recruited, with both candidates stressing the need for officers to be better trained to respond to violence against women and sexual assault.
A growing force
Created in 2021 by outgoing Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo, this force of about 2,400 officers is primarily tasked with tackling everyday petty crimes that might be expected in any major city of about two million people: routine traffic violations including speeding and illegal parking, littering in public spaces, selling souvenirs and cigarettes on city sidewalks, and a host of other minor public disturbances.
They have no power to conduct criminal investigations, conduct searches or take suspects into police custody. The only time they can arrest a suspect is if they catch him in the act of committing a crime, and even then, they must immediately take him to another member of law enforcement and hand him over.
Despite these limited powers, the number – and cost – of the country’s municipal police forces has increased dramatically in recent years. In 2013, there were 20,000 agents throughout France. By 2023, that number had increased 40 percent to 28,000.
Dimitri Coste, a doctoral student in political science writing a thesis on the capital’s municipal police at the Center for Sociological Research on Law and Penal Institutions (CESDIP), said the meteoric rise of municipal police forces seemed to have little connection to the country’s overall crime rate.
“Since the 1980s, generally speaking, mayors have paid renewed attention to security issues, and since then municipal police forces have been growing steadily, quite independently of crime statistics,” he said.
“In fact, to date, it cannot be said that there is a link one way or another; that is, it is not because there is more crime that more municipal police forces are being created, nor is it because there are more municipal police forces that crime statistics are falling.”
Over roughly that same period, the percentage of municipal police officers carrying out their duties armed has increased from 38 percent to 58 percent; Paris remains a notable exception.
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Coste said the shooting death of municipal police officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe in a terrorist attack in 2015 had been a key factor in the push to arm France’s local police.
“Being armed does not correspond to their needs to fulfill their mission: the work of the municipal police focuses on what could be called minor crimes,” he stated. “Therefore, there is no operational need for them to be armed to accomplish their missions.”
AI-led surveillance
The question of whether or not Paris municipal police should be armed has become a point of bitter controversy in the race for the capital’s next mayor. Here we see a return to the sharp political divide between left and right: Dati, Knafo and Bournazel have called for the city’s police officers to be armed, while Grégoire and Chikirou have remained firmly against the idea.
“What we are seeing today is that the issue of arming the municipal police is first and foremost a political dividing line. For example, in the case of Paris, what we are seeing is that all the main candidates agree to keep the municipal police in place,” Coste said. “Most of them will increase the number of municipal police, but the main division between right and left is the issue of firearms.”
Strengthening Paris’ municipal police is not the only means the city’s next mayor has at his disposal. Several candidates have also proposed vastly expanding the city’s network of video surveillance cameras, and Dati in particular has committed to installing a total of 8,000, double the number currently in the capital. By installing a camera on every street – a measure that will have to be negotiated with the city’s police prefecture – he says Paris will have no “blind spots.”
Far-right Knafo, whose unexpectedly strong polls in the run-up to the vote could position her as a kingmaker heading into the March 22 runoff, has gone even further, suggesting integrating “artificial intelligence technology” into the city’s surveillance system to better “detect and prevent” crimes.
But even if the city’s next mayor is willing to invest in the amount of staff needed to oversee such large-scale surveillance, researchers remain unconvinced to what extent these cameras actually deter criminals or help authorities catch them.
“What we have observed, regardless of the territory, is that the cameras installed in public spaces do not have any deterrent effect,” Guillaume Gormand, a researcher at Sciences Po Grenoble, explained to AFP.
A 2021 study by the Research Center of the National School of Gendarmerie Officers concluded that evidence collected by surveillance cameras was useful “only in a marginal proportion of investigations.”
“There have been some studies that have looked at this issue, but they have never provided evidence of a direct link between reduced crime and the presence of video surveillance cameras,” Coste said. “At best, what we see is more of a displacement of crime once the presence of cameras is identified.”
