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This article examines the thesis according to which every management tools is thought, by its very nature, to favor a model of interaction between public actors and citizens. Taking strategic analysis and undercover policing as our case studies, we compare the ways in which these tools are used in the United States and France, suggesting that these tools are, in practice, highly malleable, since they can serve very different configurations of the relationship between police and citizens. Thus strategic analysis, which was initially developed as a crime prevention technique, in the context of problem-oriented policing, was subsequently adapted to intelligence-led policing, which emphasized a criminal enforcement paradigm. Likewise, undercover policing configures the relationship of the police to its public in a wide variety of disparate ways, which including the investigation of organized crime; peace-keeping functions; vice enforcement; and public order policing.