THE CO-PRODUCTION OF SECURITY IN THE UNITED STATES AND FRANCE.

Do local crime-fighting partnerships function differently in the United States and France? We compare local security partnerships in the United States and France to examine the remarkable differences between local security partnerships in the United States and France, which differ in part due to the minimal proactive resources, centralizing pressures, and the absence of community policing which characterize such partnerships in France, in contrast to the United States, where these features have been considered essential ingredients of local crime-fighting partnerships. We conclude that the dearth of proactive police resources for partnership initiatives, the primacy of national enforcement priorities, and the lack of community policing makes for a relatively less central role of the police in French local security partnerships, in comparison to their American counterparts, which law enforcement and municipal policy tend to control the agenda of local security partnerships, sometimes pitting one segment of local communities against other residents. The relatively more marginal role of the police in French crime-fighting partnerships makes it harder for the French police to harness such partnerships to their own enforcement agenda, which in turn makes non-police actors, including weak actors such as nonprofit organizations, more influential in French partnerships. We found a number of partnerships which used this relative autonomy to experiment with novel approaches to public safety problems.