Security plan for city of Nice

NICE’s mayor is launching his own security plan in the city after it was left out of a new national scheme.

The capital of the Côte d’Azur is not among 15 cities with areas selected as “priority security zones” (ZSP) by the government, which are to benefit from special new police teams to crack down on crimewaves. They include Amiens, where rioting recently resulted in burned buildings and cars and violence to police.

Mayor Christian Estrosi (UMP) said: “I don’t want to wait for Nice to undergo the kind of violence we saw in Amiens before anyone reacts. I’ve therefore decided to make the Moulins district [a socially disadvantaged area in the west of the city] a test-case.”

From November a team of four mediators will be present in the area from 19.00 to 1.00 five days a week. Estrosi also plans to hire private security guards who would be equipped with arms like tear gas and truncheons (but would have to contact the police in the event of discovering a crime).

Estrosi claimed on France Info that the move was justified because crime has “started going up again since the Socialists came in”, citing, in particular, thefts of gold necklaces, which have been shooting up in Nice and Paris.

His Socialist counterpart, Patrick Allemand, however remarked that Estrosi usually claimed Nice as a “model of safety”, saying it was surely good news if the city had not needed to be identified as a ZSP. He called the mayor’s remarks “an admission of failure”.

Photo: Ville de Nice