The question of safety has become one of the major axes of municipal political communication in Montpellier. For several years, the municipality led by Michaël Delafosse has highlighted two main levers: the massive deployment of video surveillance cameras in public space and firm support for "clean slate operations" (opérations place nette), those spectacular police interventions targeting drug trafficking.
These policies respond to strong social expectations. But public policy should not be judged by its intention or media visibility: it should be judged by its real, measurable, and lasting effectiveness. Research in criminology and political science now allows for a precise evaluation of these systems — and highlights alternatives that are often less visible but far more effective.
Video Surveillance: A Tool with Very Limited Effects
In Montpellier, the number of video surveillance cameras has increased sharply. Their official justification is simple: deter crime and facilitate the solving of offenses. However, scientific literature is largely skeptical.
The study Surveillance for Crime Prevention in Public Space (Welsh & Farrington, 2004), which synthesizes decades of international research, shows that cameras have at best a marginal effect on certain very specific crimes, such as vehicle thefts in enclosed car parks. On the other hand, their impact is almost zero on violence against persons, drug trafficking, or everyday incivilities.
Worse still, cameras often tend to displace crime rather than reduce it: offenses move to unequipped areas. There is also a desensitization effect, as offenders quickly integrate the presence of cameras into their practices.
Finally, these systems are expensive: installation, maintenance, human supervision, data storage. With a constant budget, every euro invested in video surveillance is a euro not invested in human presence, mediation, prevention, or social action.
"Clean Slate" Operations: Occasional Effectiveness, Structural Failure
Another pillar of current policy: "clean slate" operations, widely publicized and often presented as a firm response to drug trafficking. These operations rely on intensive and visible police interventions, sometimes coordinated with the justice system and customs.
The study Police Performance in Countering Narcotics Problems (Wardana et al., 2025) shows, however, that this type of strategy produces very limited results over time. Networks adapt quickly, move their points of sale, fragment their structures, and resume their activities a few weeks or months after the operations.
Drug trafficking works like a market: as long as demand remains, supply reconstitutes itself. Crackdown operations can provide a temporary sense of regained control, but they modify neither the social conditions that fuel trafficking nor the underlying economic balances.
They can even produce perverse effects: increased tensions with residents, loss of trust in institutions, and sometimes more diffuse violence once police pressure is released.
When Safety Policy Becomes Communication Policy
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
— H. L. Mencken
Cameras and clean slate operations have one thing in common: they are highly visible. They symbolically reassure, produce strong images, and allow political leaders to display a posture of authority.
But this logic of visibility can mask a strategic weakness: the absence of profound transformation of the mechanisms that produce insecurity. Safety then becomes an object of communication more than a result-based public policy.
Elinor Ostrom: Rethinking Safety as a Common
The work of Elinor Ostrom offers a radically different perspective. Contrary to the idea that only a centralized and coercive authority can produce security, Ostrom shows that many collective goods — including safety — are better managed when they rely on forms of shared governance.
Applied to public safety, this approach implies:
- a neighborhood police presence, established over time and known to residents;
- mechanisms for cooperation between residents, associations, municipal services, and law enforcement;
- a local capacity to identify problems, experiment with solutions, and adjust them;
- a priority given to prevention, mediation, and conflict resolution before they escalate.
In this logic, the police are not an external force that "intervenes" but one actor among others in a local safety ecosystem.
What Actually Works
The most effective policies combine several levers:
- Human presence over technology. Identified, trained, and stable police officers, mediators, and educators in neighborhoods.
- Social prevention. Combating school dropouts, access to employment, youth policies, and family support.
- Co-production of safety. Neighborhood councils endowed with real powers, local conflict resolution systems, and resident involvement.
- Reduction of criminal opportunities. Urban planning, lighting, and use of public spaces designed with residents.
These policies are less spectacular, but their effects are lasting.
For Montpellier: A Paradigm Shift
In Montpellier, persisting in a strategy centered on video surveillance and crackdown operations is like treating symptoms rather than causes. An effective safety policy requires a paradigm shift: moving from control to trust, from display to cooperation, and from reaction to prevention.
This choice is political. It engages a vision of the city, its inhabitants, and the very role of public action.