Police zones in Belgium: two police forces, 176 zones

A police zone is the territory of a local police force, placed under the authority of one or more mayors (bourgmestres). Belgium had 176 of them in early 2026, alongside a federal police that is not their superior. Two police forces, then, and this dual structure has been deliberate since 1998.

Why does Belgium have two police forces with no common chief?

Because the 1998 reform designed it that way. The Act of 7 December 1998 creates "an integrated police service, structured on two levels": a federal level and a local level. Both are autonomous, and the federal police says so itself on its presentation page: there is no hierarchical link between them.

Before 2001, the country had three separate forces. The municipal police reported to the mayor, the judicial police worked alongside the public prosecutors' offices, and the gendarmerie, a national force, answered to the Ministers of the Interior and of Defence. The parliamentary inquiry committees of the 1980s and 1990s, on the Brabant killings, on the Heysel stadium disaster and then on the Dutroux case, all identified the same flaw: services that communicated poorly, distrusted one another and competed with each other. Marc Dutroux's escape on 23 April 1998 forced the decision. A month later, on 24 May 1998, eight parties signed the so-called "Octopus" agreement, which the December act turned into law.

The federal police came into being on 1 January 2001. The local police followed a year later.

The two-level structure is no historical accident, since it made it possible to merge the gendarmerie and the judicial police into a national force while leaving mayors with a police force that remains their own, with its stations, its locally voted budget and its chief of police. That compromise, now twenty-eight years old, explains both the number of zones and the current debate over merging them.

Local police: seven tasks, a mayor, a prosecutor

Each police zone has its own force, headed by a chief of police (chef de corps). Within its territory, it carries out all basic policing tasks, both administrative and judicial. The federal police publishes the official list, the seven basic tasks of the local police:

• community policing;
• reception of the public;
• emergency response;
• police assistance to victims;
• local investigation;
• maintaining public order;
• road safety.

Authority depends on the type of task. For administrative policing, which prevents disturbances and maintains public order, the local officer acts under the authority of the mayor. For judicial policing, which records offences and investigates them, the officer works under the supervision of the Crown Prosecutor (procureur du Roi). The same inspector can answer to both authorities on the same day.

How a zone is run depends on its size. A single-municipality zone is managed by the municipality's own bodies: municipal council, board of mayor and aldermen, mayor. A multi-municipality zone has its own bodies, a police council made up of municipal councillors from the member municipalities, and a police board that brings their mayors together. The police council votes the zone's budget.

What does the federal police do that the local police does not?

It takes on whatever goes beyond a single municipality. The federal police carries out specialised judicial and administrative policing tasks, steps in when a phenomenon exceeds the local level, and provides operational, administrative or logistical support to the zones. It also represents the Belgian police in international cooperation.

Its 2025 annual report, presented on 11 March 2026, gives a sense of scale: 14,000 staff, 4,011 new investigations opened by the federal judicial police, with 20% of investigative capacity devoted to drugs, and 14.2 million passengers checked at the Schengen area's external borders. Motorways, railways, waterways, airports: these are its territory.

The two levels nevertheless share a great deal. The same statute for all police officers, the same recruitment, the same training, a single general national database, eleven provincial centres that take emergency calls for both, and the same radio network, ASTRID. Integration works through these shared tools, not through hierarchy. External oversight is shared too: Committee P (Comité P), a body of the Chamber of Representatives set up by the Act of 18 July 1991, monitors both levels.

589 forces, 196 zones, 176 zones: the count since 2001

The number of zones has never been fixed. It falls slowly, merger after merger, and official pages do not always keep up.

The gap between 181 and 176 most likely reflects mergers that the federal page has not yet recorded. Between 2011 and 2019, only Flemish zones merged; the first Walloon merger, between Anderlues-Binche and Lermes, dates from 2023.

Six zones in Brussels today, a single one tomorrow.

Who pays for my municipality's police zone?

Mostly the municipality. According to the Federal Public Service Interior, municipal contributions cover about 64% of local police funding, and the federal state the remaining 36%, through a dozen or so grants and allowances.

The largest, the basic federal grant, is allocated under the so-called KUL standard. Set in 1999, this formula calculates a theoretical police capacity for each municipality from fourteen parameters, including population, surface area, the number of offences, road accidents, tourist overnight stays and average income. In a multi-municipality zone, it is also used to split the bill between member municipalities. In February 2026, the Interior Minister announced that he was preparing a reform of this standard alongside the reform of the zones.

23 zones in Flemish Brabant, 6 in Brussels: the fragmentation argument

On 2 February 2026, in an interview reported by VRT NWS, Interior Minister Bernard Quintin summed up his position: "The current fragmentation, with 176 police zones, is not good for security." His example comes down to two figures. Flemish Brabant has 23 zones for 1.2 million inhabitants, almost the population of Brussels, which has six.

Redone from those figures, the calculation gives an order of magnitude: about 52,000 inhabitants per zone in Flemish Brabant, about 200,000 in Brussels, a ratio close to four for comparable populations.

On this reasoning, larger zones pool their resources, starting with emergency response and community policing, which the minister describes as the two pillars of a zone. The bill passed by the Chamber provides incentives for voluntary mergers in the rest of the country.

Proximity and the weight of small municipalities: the opposite argument

The Brussels municipalities responded on different ground. Brulocalis, the association of the nineteen Brussels municipalities, decided in May 2026 to bring the case before the Constitutional Court, and four mayors filed their own appeals. Auderghem, Woluwe-Saint-Pierre and Koekelberg followed on 17 September 2026.

Two objections recur. The first concerns equality: the merger is imposed on the Brussels municipalities while it remains optional elsewhere, including for smaller zones. The second concerns autonomy. In a single zone, each municipality carries less weight on the police council, and the mayor of Auderghem puts her municipality's share at under 2% of the votes, a figure she has put forward and which has not been checked against the documents. Added to this is the fear that the link between mayor and chief of police, on which community policing has rested since 2001, will weaken.

At the end of September 2026, the Court had not yet ruled.

Who decides to merge police zones?

The federal legislator. The organisation of zones is governed by a law passed by the Chamber, on a bill from the government. Neither the Brussels-Capital Region nor the municipalities decide on the merger itself, even though they are the ones who will implement it.

The Brussels process shows how it works. The Council of Ministers adopts the preliminary draft at second reading on 23 December 2025. On 13 March 2026, the Brussels Parliament takes into consideration a conflict-of-interest motion, which suspends the federal procedure for sixty days of consultation. The Chamber's Interior Committee approves the text at second reading on 21 April, and the plenary adopts it on 13 May 2026. On 8 July, according to L'Avenir and La DH, the nineteen mayors hold the first police board of the future zone, named "Police de Bruxelles" and divided into nine territorial divisions.

Elsewhere, a merger starts with the municipalities concerned and is completed by royal decree.

The debate cannot be settled with a single figure. One side measures policing in inhabitants per zone, the other in the distance between a mayor and their officers, and both rely on the same 1998 compromise. The parties' positions on security and policing can be read, without ranking, in the security and justice comparison and in the comparison tool; the thematic scores there reflect a position on an axis, not a quality, as the methodology explains. To place the police within the structure of the state, note that it is neither a regional nor a community competence: the article on Regions and Communities sets out who does what.

Sources: Act of 7 December 1998 organising an integrated police service, structured on two levels (Justel); Federal Police, presentation of the integrated police and 2025 annual report, 11 March 2026; FPS Interior, BeSafe, police funding; Committee P, services under oversight; VRT NWS, Interior Minister wants to go from 176 to 60 zones, 2 February 2026; La Libre, Chamber approves the merger of Brussels police zones, 13 May 2026; Brussels Governance Monitor, police zone merger file, updated 18 September 2026; Wikipedia (FR), Belgian police reform and police zone.