Law enforcement in France

Law enforcement in France has a long history dating back to AD 570, when night watch systems were commonplace. Policing is centralized at the national level. Recently, legislation has allowed local governments to hire their own police officers which are called the "police municipale".

There are two national police forces called "Police nationale" and "Gendarmerie nationale". The Prefecture of Police of Paris provides policing services directly to Paris as a subdivision of France's Ministry of the Interior. Within these national forces only certain designated police officers have the power to conduct criminal investigations which are supervised by investigative magistrates.

France has two national police forces:

The municipal policemen can notice all the breaches but cannot investigate. There are also local polices in the rural zones, as for the rural policemen the police rurale as such does not exist. Note the heterogeneousness of local polices both in means and in equipment.

The leadership of both agencies is centralized and they both have conventional deviance control responsibilities respectively except in different geographical locations in France. The Police Nationale is responsible for Paris and other urban areas whereas the gendarmerie is responsible for small towns and rural areas with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. The existence of two national police forces with similar goals and attributions, but somewhat different zones of activity, has at times created friction or competition between the two. Their merging has sometimes been suggested.

With the development of suburban dwellings, this had increasingly proved inadequate. Furthermore, the shifting of a town from a police to a gendarmerie zone was often controversial, because, typically, a gendarmerie unit serves a wide area.

A redistribution of authority was thus decided and implemented between 2003 and 2005. Large conurbations are now handled entirely by the police. Rural and suburban areas, and some smaller cities with populations ranging from 5,000 to 16,000, are handled by the gendarmerie.

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