The announcement had been made at a late hour, by the security assistant of the City of Paris, Nicolas Nordman, at the last Council of Paris. The City of Paris will acquire, according to a deliberation project that we have obtained, 315 new surveillance cameras “approximately”.
Sixty-three sites are concerned, “listed as the highest priority” in Paris, and the installation will be done after consultation meetings, provides for the draft deliberation. The 13th, 15th, 18th and 19th arrondissements are primarily concerned, “deficit compared to the Parisian average”, according to Nicolas Nordman, who spoke at a press conference on Thursday, and wishes to double the number of video verbalizations in 2023. According to a report by the Court of Auditors published in February 2022there is “less than one camera per 1,000 inhabitants in the 15th and 20th arrondissements, against more than eleven in the 1st and more than nine in the 8th arrondissement”.
In addition, the police headquarters plans to provide nearly 80 new sites, “in particular in anticipation of the Olympic and Paralympic Games of 2024”, explains the text of the deliberation. The town hall will pay an equipment subsidy. The overall cost of these investments made by the City of Paris is 4 million euros.
Unproven effectiveness against crime
The deliberation recalls “that no capacity for recording images is provided by the City of Paris, beyond a 10-minute backtracking from real time, necessary in order to secure in particular the video reporting of offenses roads”. But for the ecologists of the Council of Paris, and in particular Raphaëlle Rémy-Leleu, these guarantees are insufficient. She submitted a wish asking that the city “not authorize facial recognition devices” and that the police headquarters “undertake to no longer use video protection devices in the context of law enforcement operations. “.
“No red line on issues of respect for individual freedoms will be crossed,” Nicolas Nordman has already indicated at a press conference. according to Actu.fr. Ecologists also call for “an evaluation of the results obtained […] with regard to the means mobilized”. In its February 2022 report, the Court of Auditors considered that “the control of the service provider [qui assure la mission de vidéosurveillance] was insufficient” and highlighted “the lack of evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of the PVPP [plan de vidéoprotection de la préfecture de police de Paris] “.
Fines for traffic offenses that have doubled
For the right, on the contrary, the town hall does not go far enough. The Changer Paris group considers the video surveillance plan “very insufficient given the delay in the major cities of France and the crime figures which have started to rise again in 2022”. According to the right, which takes up a ranking carried out by the gazette des communes, the capital is in 28th place out of the top 50 cities in France for the number of cameras per inhabitant. The LR group also criticizes the town hall for using video surveillance cameras for the sole purpose of verbalizing traffic offenses to “bail out its coffers emptied by the expensive policies of Anne Hidalgo”.
Currently, nearly 4,000 video surveillance cameras are deployed in Paris, on nearly 1,500 sites, according to the Court of Auditors. According to the group Changer Paris, the fines drawn up by the City of Paris thanks to video verbalization have doubled between 2019 and 2021, going from nearly 140,000 euros to 280,000 euros.