Two-thirds of the workforce is missing in this town near Nantes. The opposition is protesting, while the municipality refuses to install cameras and prefers to focus on human resources. The mayor defends himself and announces new arrivals.
The Figaro Nantes
There are only three of them left. Instead of nine. “Where have the municipal police officers ?» Sébastien Arrouët, opposition municipal councillor of Orvault, warns in a press release. Located north of Nantes, this town of 27,300 inhabitants, led by a mayor with an ecological bias, has lost two-thirds of its workforce since the spring. Enough to make the centre-right minorities react, while the city’s security policy is mainly based on human resources. At the start of the mandate, there were only six of them and the mayor had therefore decided to create three additional positions.
“The strategy favoring human presence shows its limits”notes Sébastien Arrouët, spokesperson for the Aimer Orvault group, four years later. “The mayor had made human presence his hobbyhorse, which I can agree with.”adds Dominique Follut, leader of the Orvault group at the Centre, for whom the desertion of six agents represents “a failure of the mayor’s policy”According to him, it is a question of priority: “I don’t know if we can afford to have a market garden right now when the police are collapsing.” And to continue: “Security has a cost. Keeping officers may have a cost. Clearly, the mayor has not chosen to put the necessary resources into this area.”
Gone elsewhere
Contacted, the green mayor Jean-Sébastien Guitton is aware of the situation. “They either joined the Nantes municipal police or the metropolitan public transport unit.”he confides, about the missing agents. But why such departures, even though they are armed? Among the reasons given, the councilor first recalls that the recruitment tensions in this sector, which the municipality had managed to circumvent until then, are felt everywhere in the agglomeration. Then, “There is the issue of the attractiveness of positions. Nantes is a bigger city”. The hours can be less restrictive there. This is how an officer from Orvault returned to Nantes. A few years ago, the municipal police officers of the city of the Dukes had already welcomed a wave of arrivals from Saint-Herblain, a neighboring city.
To improve the situation, the town’s chief magistrate assures that a salary increase will be studied, after the introduction of a new compensation system that came into force in June in this professional sector. Furthermore, a first unsuccessful recruitment jury was held at the beginning of the summer but the candidates were not up to par. Another one took place recently, this time leading to the probable recruitment of at least two agents, or even three, soon.
No cameras
Between 2018 and 2023, general crime in Orvault decreased by 29%, according to national police figures relayed by the town hall. Burglaries, on the other hand, have been decreasing since 2020, but have increased again between 2022 and 2023 (from 163 to 200). In addition to the human presence, the security policy of the sixth city in the Loire-Atlantique department is based on coordinated municipal and national police operations, public space mediators recognizable by their red jackets, and a neighborhood system “attentive neighborhoods”aimed at reporting incivility or other malicious acts to the town hall via a website. On the other hand, the installation of video surveillance cameras is not on the agenda. “In the context of a city like Orvault, the cost-benefit ratio is very poor. The cameras are held up like a kind of totem, as if they were going to work miracles. However, many problems are not resolved.”assumes Jean-Sébastien Guitton.
Another point of disagreement with the center and the right. “While the town of Couëron, after La Chapelle-sur-Erdre, is also going to equip itself with cameras, the green mayor of Orvault is the only one in the north of the conurbation to refuse them for ideological reasons.”scolds Sébastien Arrouët, from Aimer Orvault. “Cameras will not be the panacea for everything. We are not going to replace agents who work in close proximity, but they complement these systems. It is an articulation between technological and human resources and the national police, which create a peaceful city.”adds Dominique Follut. The representative of Orvault at the Center wonders about “the mayor’s priorities which are sometimes dogmatic and the expectations of the Orvaltais”. In 2020, the city had shifted to the left, an unprecedented move since 1983, due to dissensions within the former center-right majority. This weekend, Sébastien Arrouët and Dominique Follut had planned to organize a public meeting together to take stock of the current majority.
