ABSTRACT

Since 1941, the French police has been a national police organization. This means that it is a State police organization, directly under the Home Department’s (‘ministère de l’Intérieur’) supervision and that its 127,000 members are civil servants. Its administration, organization and, often, its missions are conceived and managed from a centralized command center in Paris (‘la direction générale de la police nationale’) and relayed by State representatives by region. Local police chiefs have quite a lot of autonomy in their everyday running. This centralized feature of French police is important when it comes to training: police recruitment is held nationwide, which means that a young recruit from a little village in a western region of France can be trained in a school based in Roubaix (in the north of France) and then sent to a police station in a suburb of Paris.