Another Canton adjusts the authority of municipal police...

http://www.laregion.ch/nouveau-role-...e-de-vallorbe/

Valais's new law regulating the organization of police will change the duties of municipal police from being analogous to Cantonal Police to more of an "administrative police"; municipal police officers will no longer be considered police officers under the new law, but will instead be considered "Public Safety Assistants" with more limited enforcement powers and will generally not be permitted to carry firearms.

I imagine after the changeover, these local administrative police depts in Valais will function much like the Orts-und Gewerbepolizei in Stadt Bern/Gemeinde Verwaltungspolizei in Thun/Koniz, BE...

First of all it is not Valais/Wallis but Vallorbe is in Vaud/Waadtland, and second, the new rules apply to Vallorbe. But I do not believe that the powerful City Police of Lausanne gives up its police role

Why did I keep thinking Valais?

Anyways, seems to be a trend in western Switzerland (La Chaux-de-Fonds NE, Bern, Koniz, Biel, Thun BE) to have the towns do the administrative policing (taxi inspections, dog tax enforcement, my neighbour put their garbage out to earlier etc) and the Cantons handle criminal stuff...

I guess I was confused as I saw the flag of Valais behind the picture of the speaker in the picture; I then skimmed through both Vaud's and Valais's "Loi sur l’organisation de la police"..

Skimming again though Vaud's LPOL, the a city/town can have it's police force (armed/officers have "Brevet Federal") which must be accredited by l'Etat de Vaud, or the city/town can contract to the Cantonal Police; regardless if the city/town has it's own Police Dept, the city/town may also employ "Public Safety Assistants" to do lower policing tasks...

No, this is not a trend but general practice and as such is not new. City police forces are in charge with traffic (all forms), public order, etc, but the crime-squad (Kriminalpolizei) everywhere is in the hands of the Cantonal Police.

You, when looking into this

http://yellow.local.ch/de/q/8001/polizei.html?rid=xNt8

that specific sections of the Kriminalpolizei are part of the Stadtpolizei. In case of a crime you can often see that people of the Stadtpolizei take care of traffic issues and people of the Kantonspolizei handle the crime matter itself

and the division has nothing to do with lower or higher but with work-sharing

basically, all cities, which means places with more than 10'000 inhabitants, have a Stadtpolizei.

The trend I was mentioning was Cantons limiting the duties of municipal policing in starting in the mid-to-late 2000s; for example, cities and towns in Kt. Bern had their own armed police, in the case of Stadt Bern even had their own armed officers to protect the embassies. The laws changed, and Municipal Police turned in their firearms and had their duties were changed to more licensing and quality of life enforcement, hence changing their names from Stadtpolizei/police municipale to Verwaltungs/Gewerbepolizei or Police Locale/police administrative. From what I understand, local government officers in Bern aren't even authorized to do traffic enforcement. Same story for local government enforcement in Kt. Fribourg, however I understand that Police Locale in Kt. Fribourg can now do some traffic enforcement (no speed enforcement though) on non-highway streets as of 2013.


Same thing happened in Kt. SH, Stadt Schaffhausen and Neuhausen am Rheinfall had their own full municipal police like Winterthur ZH; they've changed from being Stadtpolizei to Verwaltungspolizei.

It seemed like pre-2005, municipal police in Switzerland were fairly uniform in their duties and equipment regardless of Canton; post-2005ish, many have appeared to switch from Stadtpolizei to more of an "Ordnungsamt" role common to local goverment enforcement in Germany

No, you have to realize that it was and is the cities who want to get rid of some sections. Why ? Because the cities increasingly had to do duties which in fact were duties for the outer suburbs and even the agglomeration. Look at Zürich. The political city has some 400'000 inhabitants, the city including outer suburbs means 830'000 inhabitants (difference 430'000) and the agglomeration some 1.3 mio (diff. 700'000). This means that the City of Zürich for decades heavily worked on handing over many functions well including many unwanted Ordnungsamt functions to the Cantonal Police. The situation in Bern and Luzern is comparable. And no again, the Cantonal police forces in this process had to take over tons of "Ordnungsamt" stuff in the process. And criminal police work means 3 hours of outdoors activity and then 300 hours of office work,

Before those shifts, the Cantonal Police forces had far less Ordnungsamt functions than now. And this is another aspect. Space ? The Stadtpolizei has to work with office space in downtown, where they need to be, while the Kantonspolizei can shift office-space to outer suburbs very easily

No argument in regards to Luzern, from what I've heard the Cantonal police in Kt. Luzern have taken over pretty much everything in regards to law enforcement; despite the size of City, Luzern did not keep a "Gewerbe/Verwaltungspolizei" to inspect for business licenses etc...Instead, Luzern supposedly had these uniformed mediators that walk around public areas to observe and report undesired activities; supposedly they cannot write any Bussgeld either...

Luzern is a beautiful city, but of course rather narrow, and so, many things in the past two decades were "outsourced" to the Kanton and moved to places like Emmen/Emmenbrücke, Ebikon, Sursee, Willisau and Wolhausen. In addition to that one or two or three former outher suburbs have merged into the City.

Concerning Vallorbe, it is the result of the reorganization of the police in Vaud. After the rejection of the initiative "D'Artagnan" (initiated by the Gendarmes 'trade union'), the Security Director of the canton (former mayor of La Tour de Peilz) pushed for a reform of the various police forces. Some were tiny : two cops in charge of mainly administrative and parking enforcement. They weren't even working after 1700 or on weekend. But their officers had the same basic training as any other cops.

The municipalities had to either merge their departments to reach the critical size in order to assume the community policing and the emergency duties 24/7 or face the need to contract the cantonal police for those tasks. The canton is the authority regarding the public order and law enforcement according the Swiss constitution.

Most forces merged but Vallorbe, due to its location,couldn't (AFAIK) as the new regional polices need a continuous territory for their jurisdiction. Without knowing the full details, I can imagine that some of the colleagues would rather stay with the municipality even if it means they will lose their warrant card while the younger one will transfer to another force.

Thanks. This is more or less what I suspected. But as I only was, back in 1974, in ORBE for three weeks and never in VALLorbe, I had no clue about the local realities. The train-changes were in Chavornay and Yverdon