Since 2007 and the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as President of the French Republic, the debate on the academic and political legitimacy of a discipline called “criminology” has been ongoing in France, along with the concern raised by the setting up of a string of institutions aiming at the centralization and control of statistical production on crime and, broadly speaking, of the production of knowledge on safety and justice. These processes are supported by a network of actors sharing a police-oriented conception of this science (i.e. knowledge of crime has the arrest of criminals as its sole objective). This article tries to objectivize this dogma and the networks devoted to its implementation.