Répartition des zones de compétences entre police et gendarmerie : les leçons d’un apparent changement d’échelle de l’action publique déterminé par « l’effet-taille »

The apparent change in scale that security policies have experienced over the past few decades, due in particular to urbanization and its corollary which constituted the affirmation of the peri-urban space, has led to the emergence, for the gendarmerie forces, of a regime of territorial reflexivity of public action mixing reticular action, interterritoriality and new divisions. Concerning more particularly the redistributions between police and gendarmerie zones induced by this apparent problem of change of scale, the segmentations constructed to objectify them have essentially retained criteria of a demographic nature. If the latter indeed make it possible to identify a gradation of the intensity of delinquency according to the size of urban areas and to objectify to a certain extent the notion of delinquency basin, they do not shed light on the geographical diversity of situations. and require, in order to take local specificities into account, to construct segmentations based on the very nature of the offenses.