French President Emmanuel Macron proposed a range of tough new measures to tackle crime during a visit to Nice on Monday.

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Macron said he wanted to increase France’s interior security budget by €15 billion over a five-year period, amounting to a 25 percent increase on current spending. 

The French president has yet to declare his candidacy to be reelected at this year’s presidential election – although it is thought highly likely that he will run – but these politcies could only be voted on after the presidential race is complete in May.

He also proposed

• automatically issuing fines to people who would otherwise be sentenced to less than one year in prison
• adding a further 1,500 staff to the cybercrime force
• tripling the fine for harassment in the street to €300
• doubling the number of police on public transport
• doubling the number of police in the streets. 

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Macron said that 10,000 new policing jobs had been created since the start of his presidency and that he would work to ensure that police and gendarmes would be freed from administrative tasks to allow them to spend more time patrolling the streets. 

He also announced that 200 gendarmerie brigades would be set up in the countryside to “bring tranquility back to the most rural areas.”

Macron also vowed to set up a “republican action force for the neighbourhoods”, by which he means deprived city suburbs. 

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“In the most difficult neighbourhoods, [it] will allow us to deploy dedicated security forces over several months which will come to make the neighbourhood safer, aiming to dismantle the principle drug dealing points,” he said.