The race for Paris: Will more armed police and more cameras make the city safer?

Is it safe to walk the streets of Paris? Fewer and fewer Parisians certainly seem to think so.

An IFOP-Fiducial opinion poll published in the lead-up to the first round of the municipal elections this Sunday showed that public safety had risen to the number-one concern of Parisians ahead of the ballot. 

Eager to play to their traditional strengths, right-wing candidates including former culture minister Rachida Dati have hammered the need for urgent action to keep the city safe, including massively expanding the city’s network of video surveillance cameras and putting thousands of armed city police officers onto the streets of Paris.

Whether or not the figures back up the belief that crime rates are rising in the capital is fiercely contested. Crime statistics released by the interior ministry for 2025 show that robbery and violent thefts continue to decline in the capital, while recorded incidents of sexual assault and violence appear to have risen in line with national trends.

And while more and more surveys reveal that the French are grappling with a rising feeling of insecurity, the proportion that actually feel personally unsafe in their own neighbourhoods 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-run race for the city’s new mayor on Sunday.

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Just what they expect him or her to do about it is another question. Paris’s Hôtel de Ville has many powers, but launching criminal investigations into organised crime or dismantling international narcotrafficking networks are not among them.

The national police force tasked with tackling major crime in the capital answers to the Paris Prefecture, which answers in turn to France’s interior ministry.

As a result, candidates from across the political spectrum have pledged to deploy thousands of officers belonging to the city’s nascent municipal police.

Far-right candidate Sarah Knafo has called for the number of municipal police officers patrolling the streets of Paris to be almost quadrupled to 8,000, with centre-right candidate Pierre-Yves Bournazel and Dati demanding 6,000 and 5,000 respectively.

On the left, which at different points in its history has looked to the municipal police as a chance to put an elusive model of "community policing" into practice, the push for more manpower has also found support.

Socialist candidate Emmanuel Grégoire has called for the city’s police force to be swelled by 1,000 new members, and for 500 fresh CCTV cameras to be installed across the city. Hard-left candidate Sophia Chikirou has also called for a little more than 1,000 new officers to be recruited, with both candidates stressing the need for officers to be better trained in responding to violence against women and sexual assault. 

A rising force

Created in 2021 by outgoing Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo, this force of roughly 2,400 officers is largely tasked with tackling the day-to-day misdemeanours that might be expected in any major city of some two-million-odd souls: routine traffic violations including speeding and illegal parking, dumping rubbish in public spaces, selling souvenirs and cigarettes on the city’s sidewalks and a host of other minor public disturbances.

They have no power to conduct criminal investigations, conduct searches or place suspects under police custody. The only time they can apprehend a suspect is if they catch them in the act of committing a crime – and even then, they must immediately bring them before another member of law enforcement, and hand them over.  

Despite these limited powers, the number – and cost – of the country’s municipal police forces has risen dramatically in recent years. In 2013, there were 20,000 officers across France. By 2023, that number had risen 40 percent to 28,000.

Dimitri Coste, a PhD candidate in political science writing a thesis on the capital’s municipal police at the Centre for Sociological Research on Law and Penal Institutions (CESDIP), said that municipal police forces’ meteoric rise seemed to have little connection with the country’s overall crime rate.

“Since the 1980s, broadly speaking, there has been a renewed focus on security issues by mayors, and since then, municipal police forces have been growing steadily – quite independently of crime statistics,” he said.

“In fact, to date, you can’t say that there is a link one way or the other – that is to say, it’s 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 those municipal police officers that go about their duties while armed has risen from 38 percent to 58 percent – Paris remaining a notable exception. 

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Coste said that the fatal shooting of municipal police officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe in a 2015 terror attack had been a key factor in the push to arm France’s local police.

“Being armed doesn’t correspond to their needs in order to fulfill their mission – municipal police work focuses on what could be called petty crime,” he said. “So there is no operational need for them to be armed in order to fulfill their missions.”

AI-led surveillance

The question of whether or not Paris’s municipal police should be armed has become a point of bitter contention 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 all called for the city’s police officers to be armed, while Grégoire and Chikirou have held fast 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 on keeping the municipal police force in place,” Coste said. “Most of them will increase the number of municipal police officers, but the main divide between the right and the left is the issue of firearms.”

Strengthening Paris’s municipal police is not the only means that the city’s next mayor has at their disposal. A number of candidates have also proposed widely expanding the city’s network of video surveillance cameras, with Dati in particular pledging to roll out a total of 8,000 – double the number in the capital now. By installing a camera in every street – a measure that will need to be negotiated with the city’s police prefecture – she says Paris will have no “blind spots” left.

The far-right Knafo, whose unexpectedly strong polling in the lead-up to the vote could see her positioned as kingmaker moving into the March 22 runoff, has gone even further, suggesting integrating “AI technology” into the city’s surveillance system to better “detect and prevent” crimes.

But even if the city’s next mayor is prepared to invest in the number of personnel needed to oversee such wide-scale surveillance, researchers remain unconvinced on just how much these cameras actually dissuade criminals – or help law enforcement catch them.

“What we've observed, regardless of the territory, is that cameras installed in public spaces have no deterrent effect,” Sciences Po Grenoble researcher Guillaume Gormand told AFP.

A 2021 study by the Research Centre of the National Gendarmerie Officers' School found that evidence collected from surveillance cameras was useful “only in a marginal proportion of investigations”.

“There have been a few studies that have looked into this issue, but they have never provided evidence of a direct link between a reduction in 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.”