Traditional approaches to public security and crime control place most of the burden on the central government and its agents at the local level. The current climate in France, however, has caused the state’s role in crime prevention to diminish while locally-based approaches and diverse stakeholders take more responsibility for crime prevention and community safety. The author reviews this shift in the power dynamics of crime control and public security and argues that local elected officials have more legitimacy through the mechanisms of power decentralization and have greater access to programmatic and strategic resources. This results in an organization of local elected leaders who are unlikely to be dismantled by the top-down approach traditionally utilized by the central government. Indeed, it is argued that the central government lacks the legitimacy it once had to impose top-down approaches, resulting in a new form of security governance in France using a contract-based territorial model. This shift in crime prevention ideology is most notable in the trend toward decentralization of public administration as well as institutional factors involved in the dismantling of the state's monopoly on security. Notes, references