As liberal political and economic forms become more entrenched in Europe, the role and practical limits of the State become increasingly problematic. This manifests itself alternately as a challenge to the moral authority of the French State or its legitimation as the necessarily violent and repressive grounds of democratic possibility. In France, the Police Nationale serves as both the practical arm and paradigmatic symbol of state intervention. The police, as a centralized state institution, is charged with, and understood to personify, the problem of how to put into practice the assemblage of reformatory orientations and impulsions generally labeled "neo-liberal." The tension between interventionist state policy and more laissez-faire approaches get expressed in the debate over the relative merits of two models of policing: the police de proximitá ("community policing"), a socially-oriented strategy of urban policing, and the culture de résultats ("culture of results"), whose proponents argue is more "effective" due to its "economic" use of police efforts. This paper, based on extensive ethnographic research among police officers in metropolitan France, investigates the seemingly contradictory logics of police administration and reform as they map out this new terrain of contemporary policing. What is at stake in contemporary debates surrounding the reorganization of the French police is not only the quantitative question of "how much" policing is desirable for a liberal democracy, nor a delimitation of the contours of what would constitute a legitimate form of police practice, but also the very moral authority upon which State action is grounded.