police

Dictionary: po·lice   (pə-lēs')

1. The governmental department charged with the regulation and control of the affairs of a community, now chiefly the department established to maintain order, enforce the law, and prevent and detect crime.
2. 1. A body of persons making up such a department, trained in methods of law enforcement and crime prevention and detection and authorized to maintain the peace, safety, and order of the community.
   2. A body of persons having similar organization and function: campus police. Also called police force.
3. (used with a pl. verb) Police officers considered as a group.
4. Regulation and control of the affairs of a community, especially with respect to maintenance of order, law, health, morals, safety, and other matters affecting the public welfare.
5. Informal. A group that admonishes, cautions, or reminds: grammar police; fashion police.
6. 1. The cleaning of a military base or other military area: Police of the barracks must be completed before inspection.
   2. The soldiers assigned to a specified maintenance duty.

1. To regulate, control, or keep in order with or as if with a law enforcement agency.
2. To make (a military area, for example) neat in appearance: policed the barracks.

[French, from Old French policie, civil organization, from Late Latin polītīa, from Latin, the State, from Greek polīteia, from polītēs, citizen, from polis, city.]

noun

A member of a law-enforcement agency: bluecoat, finest, officer, patrolman, patrolwoman, peace officer, policeman, police officer, policewoman. Informal cop, law. Slang bull¹, copper, flatfoot, fuzz, gendarme, heat, man (often uppercase). Chiefly British bobby, constable, peeler. See law.

verb

1. To maintain or keep in order with or as if with police: patrol. See law.
2. To make or keep (an area) clean and orderly: clean (up), clear (up), neaten (up), spruce (up), straighten (up), tidy (up). See order/disorder.

n. 1. (usually the police) the civil force of a federal or local government, responsible for the prevention and detection of crime and the maintenance of public order.

2. members of a police force: there are fewer women police than men.

1. (policing) (of a police force) have the duty of maintaining law and order in or for (an area or event).

2. enforce regulations or an agreement in (a particular area or domain): a U.N. resolution to use military force to police the no-fly zone.

3. enforce the provisions of (a law, agreement, or treaty): the regulations will be policed by inspectors.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Policing is the activity of enforcing the criminal law and it has taken place in any society which can be said to have such a law. But in most societies the people doing the policing have also had other functions; typically they have been the military, church officials, citizens taking their turn, or persons hired by the magistrates. With the arguable exception of the Roman Empire, the existence of ‘the police’, a separate force designed entirely for enforcing the criminal law, is a product of modern urban society. The establishment of a metropolitan police force in London 1829 is usually seen as the single most important event in this development. Police forces covered all of the United Kingdom by 1860 and many other states had imitated the development.

The existence of a police force, by its very nature, raises several related political issues. The oldest is summed up by the Latin question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who guards the guardians?) That is, given the capacities and force of arms which the police must have to do their job, to whom are they accountable and how can they be prevented from abusing their position? Two related questions concern how the extent of police activity is to be defined and limited and the level of government at which responsibility for policing is treated. Subsidiary issues arise about how many police forces there should be and what should be the relations between them.

Accountability to local government suggests that the police will be responsive to local feelings and have good relations with the local community. But it might also imply that the police enforce local prejudices and are easily corrupted. The British solution is to have local police forces which are heavily regulated and partly funded by the central government. A more common solution is to have more than one police force with different crimes dealt with at different levels; typically, the more serious crime is the concern of the larger territorial unit. In an extreme case a crime in the United States might be contested by the jurisdiction of six different forces, including the sole police force for the US as a whole, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI deals with crimes of an interstate nature or those beyond the capacity of more local forces; necessarily, its job must be, to some extent, to police the police.

The largest single reason for the situation in the United States is the concept of ‘police power’, of a clearly defined limit on the sort of things that can be policed. Constitutionally, this is limited to the ‘health, safety, morals, and general welfare’ of the population. Although, in principle, these criteria might seem to suggest no real limit, the courts have actually used them to limit the criminal law. In other English-speaking countries the idea of the limits of police power is less well honed in the courts, but is informally applied.

— Lincoln Allison

For more information on police, visit Britannica.com.

For years Britons resisted having a proper police force, because they associated it with repression, especially of the French kind. They also feared it would raise their rates. Their only recourse was the army, backed up by tough sanctions. That could be counter-productive. Peterloo, for example, and the Cato Street executions set people against the government. A gentler means of public control was required.

Sir Robert Peel devised his first police bill while chief secretary for Ireland, leading to the creation of the Irish Constabulary in 1822. In 1829 he persuaded Parliament to accept something similar for London, to be called the Metropolitan Police. All policemen were put in a distinctive uniform, so that they could not be taken for ‘spies’. They were unarmed, except for short batons. Of its first 2, 800 recruits, 2, 238 were dismissed from the force, sometimes for simply taking a drink or a nap. But it worked. Other areas of the country called the ‘Met’ in to help. After 1833 they were permitted to set up their own forces, on the London model. Those which did not were finally made to by Acts of 1856 (England and Wales) and 1857 (Scotland).

A later development was the growth of a plain clothes detective branch. That began in London in 1842, but consisted initially of only eight men. In 1877 a scandal implicated three of the detective branch's four inspectors in a turf fraud they were supposed to be investigating. That provoked a shake-up, out of which the present-day Criminal Investigation Department was born in 1878.

The police's most controversial role has always been its public order one. Its problem was that keeping order in times of civil unrest could be interpreted as acting for the state against the democracy. Strikes were the most difficult case. In general, the British police have successfully maintained their image of being ‘consensual’, though periodically accused of ‘racism’.

During the ancien régime, police was a nebulous concept that combined administrative and judicial powers, for to administer was to judge and judgement implied the power to carry out the decision. Police thus implied the responsibility for keeping good order within the jurisdiction of a court. Parlements, prévôtés, municipalities all had often conflicting local powers of police, over highways, the grain trade, charitable institutions, acts of disorder, etc.

The more modern sense of police also existed in the form of a number of royal officers given powers to preserve order and arrest criminals. In the early 16th c. the powers given to the Prévôt de Paris were systematized, and by 1535 there existed 32 commissioners, 3 lieutenants, 20 archers, and 10 sergeants. Similar organizations were supposed to exist in the provinces and major towns. Not until 1667 did an edict establish a lieutenant-general of police in Paris (La Reynie) with extensive powers, and similar offices were set up in the major towns. In Paris a vast number of spies and informers (mouchards) were in service, and the detailed knowledge of the population was the envy of other rulers. Nevertheless, the continued existence of privileged jurisdictions interfered with the pursuit of, for example, illegal publishers. In 1789 the civilian organization for the keeping of order was never in a position to quell revolutionary activity.

Order was kept, to the limited extent that it was, by the maréchaussée. This force of mounted archers had had responsibility for the pursuit of criminals (e.g. thieves, smugglers, seditious or sacrilegious persons, counterfeiters) since the time of François I^er. From 1720 each généralité (administrative region) had a company of archers; 34 existed in 1789, totalling about 4, 000 men. After 1791 the maréchaussée was converted into the gendarmerie. The Revolutionary legislation brought about a separation of justice and administration, but the French police is much more involved in aspects of the state administration than the British. In 1811 special commissioners were set up, suppressed during the Restoration and re-established later. From 1829 uniformed police officers were employed; the force expanded and there were 3, 000 sergents de ville in Paris in 1861; and growth continued such that in 1985 the Police Nationale numbered about 120, 000 (all services) and the Gendarmerie Nationale a further 88, 000, making France one of the most densely policed states in Europe.

[Peter Campbell]

Police agencies in the United States are oriented toward local control. Their counterparts in other industrialized countries, by contrast, are usually part of a centralized national police force. As a result of the focus on independent local control, there are some 20,000 different police agencies in the U.S. (not including the wide variety of specialized federal forces), financed and managed by states, counties, and municipalities. The lack of a centralized national system has led to problems of jurisdiction, information sharing, and even basic ideology. But the overriding fear of a national force and the abuse of its power has long been a hallmark of the American system of law.

Police Organization

Metropolitan police agencies in the U.S. were originally organized on a military model, and their development in the second half of the nineteenth century was strongly influenced by Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Force of London, founded in 1829. The British system used an organization of constables and watchmen who patrolled the streets and often charged fees for their services. Early law enforcement efforts in the U.S. were loosely organized, as there was no perceived need for full-time, professional forces, and watchmen were usually volunteers. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, large metropolitan areas such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago had created permanent fulltime police forces. Professional, fulltime state police forces were not commonplace in the U.S. until the twentieth century.

Because most U.S. police agencies have been created and funded by the local communities, and because they were created at different times, there are many variations in how the agencies are organized and financed. In general, city police are funded by the municipality and headed by a police chief, either appointed by the mayor or elected. Counties employ patrolmen and sheriffs, who usually answer to an elected county official. State police agencies, which have broader jurisdiction, assist in statewide investigations and are responsible for traffic law enforcement in areas outside municipalities. Local law enforcement agencies also have a variety of specialized units, including those for transit, parks, ports, housing, and schools.

Federal police agencies mostly developed later, although the United States Treasury established the U.S.

Mint Police in 1792. The Treasury Department oversees other specialized police agencies as well, including the U.S. Customs Service, the Internal Revenue Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and the Secret Service. The Justice Department law enforcement agency was established in 1870 and includes the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the U.S. Marshals (in charge of guarding and transporting federal prisoners, among other duties). In addition, other federal agencies have been established for specific law enforcement. These include the U.S. Park Police, the Border Patrol, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission. The executive branch directs most federal agencies, with oversight by the legislative and judicial branches.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 1996 there were 922,200 full-time, local police personnel, of whom 663,535 had arrest powers. Steady increases for the last two decades indicate a 2001 estimate of around 1,000,000 local law enforcement employees across the country, about a quarter of them women and minorities. Statistics from 1997 show that, on average, local police officers were required to have 1,100 hours of training (sheriffs averaged 900 hours), and, by 2000, more than thirty-seven percent of local police agencies were required to have some college education. In 2000, there were 88,496 federal officers, about thirty-one for every 100,000 people (in Washington, D.C., the ratio was 1,397 federal officers for every 100,000 residents). The majority of federal officers are in Texas; California; Washington, D.C.; New York; and Florida.

History of Police Forces

Permanent police forces were created in metropolitan areas such as New York (1853) and Philadelphia (1856) to handle the increase of population and the social problems that came with urban industrialization. Police officers were uniformed, making them easily identifiable on the street, which in turn expanded their duties beyond mere law enforcement; policemen gave directions, took in lost children, assisted the indigent, enforced health codes, and, with the emergence of the automobile, directed traffic and enforced the rules of the road. Police reform in the late nineteenth century made police officers civil servants, providing a salary and doing away with the earlier system of fees for services. As a result, police officers were more inclined to help all victims of crime, not just those who could afford the fees. In 1906, in an effort to end nepotism and favoritism, San Francisco established a system of hiring based on scores from civil service tests, a practice that became the national standard.

The twentieth century brought scientific research and technology to the world of policing. New techniques in identifying physical characteristics (such as fingerprints, first used in the early 1900s) meant police agencies spent more energy on criminal investigations, crime prevention, and other specialized tasks. Between the 1920s and 1940s, most large cities had special juvenile crime divisions; in the 1920s and 1930s, there was an expansion of traffic divisions; in the 1940s and 1950s, police agencies created public relations positions; the 1950s brought the first telephoto transmissions of documents, photographs, and fingerprints; and since the 1970s, police agencies have worked toward computerized data collecting, sharing, and analysis. By the end of the twentieth century, metropolitan police forces had specialized units for dealing with exigencies such as bombs, hostage situations, crowd control, underwater rescue, and terrorism.

Forensic science advanced evidence gathering and analysis in the last decades of the twentieth century, but smaller, rural police forces seldom had the resources or training to take advantage of scientific advancements. Whereas the results of DNA testing were usually considered reliable, such tests could take months without the necessary resources or trained personnel to conduct them. As of 2001 there were still several states with no uniform system of preserving crime scenes and gathering evidence.

Issues in Policing

Because police officers are authorized to use physical force, including deadly force, concerns over the abuse of power have long been a central and justified concern. The ethnic and racial makeup of early police agencies usually mirrored those who held political power, with nonwhites and women generally barred from employment as regular officers. Not until the 1960s did women and minorities became visible as police officers. By 2000, the Justice Department estimated that women and minorities represent around twenty-two percent of the nation's local police force.

Historically, the minority populations of urban areas have experienced strained relations with the police. In the 1850s, so-called nativist movements fought the inclusion of immigrants on police forces in Chicago and New York. Although police squads protected black residents from white mobs during the 1940s and 1950s, the 1960s brought race riots, including those in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which left nine people dead, and the 1965 riots in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, which left four dead. Riots broke out in Los Angeles in 1992 after the not-guilty verdict in the case against four white police officers who had been videotaped beating Rodney King, an African American. New York had also notorious abuse scandals in the late 1990s, including the police torture of the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in 1997 and the shooting death in 1999 of the West African immigrant Amadou Diallo. Such high-profile cases have spurred a reexamination of police policies and the way internal investigations are conducted.

Although abuse of power by police officers is a legitimate concern, according to a 1999 review of police agency statistics, police officers use force in only 0.2 percent of their interactions with the public, the majority involving physical force without the use of a weapon.

Police Agencies in the Future

Social science has aided police work just as forensic science has. Most modern metropolitan police forces have adapted to the diverse needs of their communities, with specialized units and creative alternatives to traditional police methods. One of the strongest trends has been toward community policing, an attempt to make police officers more familiar to the residents and merchants of a neighborhood. Community involvement in policing has also influenced the investigation and rectification of police abuse and corruption, with the public demanding a greater role. Fears of "racial profiling," the alleged tendency of police officers to target minority groups, has spawned efforts to educate police about the cultural differences between ethnic and racial groups.

Police reform has been slow, because discussions generally take place at the national level, whereas new policies are drafted by local departments. This situation will almost certainly evolve as the need for interagency cooperation increases, and as federal police agencies work in concert with local agencies to form a national computer database for gathering information and sharing intelligence.

Bibliography

Dulaney, W. Marvin. Black Police in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Riley, Gail Blasser. Miranda v. Arizona: Rights of the Accused. Hillside, N.J.: Enslow, 1994.

U.S. Department of Justice. Home Page available from http://www.usdoj.gov/.

Vila, Brian, ed. The Role of Police in American Society: A Documentary History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Woods, Gerald. The Police in Los Angeles: Reform and Professionalization. New York: Garland, 1993.

Police, services composed of trained, full-time, paid officers dedicated to reducing the causes of crime, deterring its commission by regular patrols, and investigating lawbreaking and apprehending its perpetrators, are central to the operation of modern, bureaucratic, and centralized states. But at the start of the early modern period, most European states lacked effective professional police forces, and such agencies developed only slowly, in part because of the relative weakness of early modern state institutions and the fiscal limitations under which they labored. Also, the very word "police" described for early modern administrators all those institutions and regulations necessary to establish a well-ordered state, not just to fight crime. Thus officials encumbered some early police agencies with far more duties than those of their modern counterparts.

Everywhere too the effectiveness of early modern policing was limited by the reluctance of much of the population to have recourse to the police. Historians find this reticence revealed in several ways. Early modern Europeans often themselves regulated much of the behavior controlled by modern police. Among established populations, disputes that produce police action in modern societies often entirely escaped the attention of the authorities in the early modern period, when they concluded with subjudicial settlements mediated by priests, notaries, or local dignitaries. Additionally, interpersonal violence frequently resulted in vendettas that endured for years before coming to the cognizance of the authorities. Indeed, citizens sought state judicial and police authority only under certain circumstances. For example, local residents readily reported to authorities the activities of outsiders, like wandering vagrants, and they also sought the assistance of agents of the state against neighbors whose misdeeds transcended local thresholds of tolerable behavior. Early modern police agencies, both traditional institutions and newer forces that proved to be the precursors of modern policing, depended on such civilian cooperation for the limited effectiveness they possessed.

Traditional Police Agencies

When they did have contact with representatives of police authority, most early modern Europeans dealt with agents of seigneurial, municipal, or royal courts charged with executing arrest orders issued by magistrates in response to citizen complaints. On the Continent, larger courts often had paid officers for such duties, men bearing a variety of titles, including sergents in many French jurisdictions and sbirri in the Papal States. The numbers of such officers were always limited, and they were at a great disadvantage in the face of concerted opposition to the execution of their orders. In late-seventeenth-century Amsterdam, for example, the force of the schout, an official who functioned much like a public prosecutor and police chief, numbered only eighteen men in a city of 200,000 inhabitants. The same number of officers served the criminal court of Florence, the Otto di Guardia e Balìa, in the mid-sixteenth century when the city had sixty thousand citizens.

At even greater disadvantage were the unsalaried officers of justice common in several countries. In England, western Germany, Sweden, and much of the Dutch Republic, justice and policing were in the hands of unpaid citizens serving terms of office that punctuated their everyday occupations. Often without formal legal education, the justice of the peace of England, the länsman of Sweden, the Schultheis of Württemburg, and the judge of the Dutch schepenbanken sought execution of their orders by unpaid officers also drawn from the local community. These men, including the English constable and the Dutch baljuw, ruwaard, or drossard, might sometimes be in considerable danger while fulfilling their duties because they usually acted alone. Their only possible aid might have been the citizen participation in a general hue and cry required by ordinances in England and many German jurisdictions.

In addition to these agents of the courts, most European towns had various forces that also performed police functions. Even small cities on the Continent possessed ceremonial municipal guard units composed of local citizens who turned out armed and uniformed on such occasions as a royal visit, but they were ill-trained and of little practical use for law enforcement. More common were various sorts of watch units enlisting men who sometimes drew municipal salaries, like those of the guet of Bordeaux in the eighteenth century. The Bordeaux watch was quite typical of many such units in its numerical weakness. It had but seventy men to patrol a city with a late-eighteenth-century population of about 100,000 persons. Night watch arrangements in England were even less formal and until the eighteenth century depended on the Statute of Winchester of 1285, which required individual citizens to take unpaid turns in nightly patrols of their local parishes.

Toward Professional Policing

Only slowly did some European states manage to create full-time, paid, professional police forces, and France led in this process. France was the only European state to create and maintain a centrally administered agency of rural policing in the early modern period. That force, the Maréchaussée, originated in an armed military police force that not only maintained order along the army's line of march and pursued deserters but also had the power to try in its own courts those it apprehended. By the sixteenth century the French monarchy added to that force's military duties competence over a growing list of nonmilitary offenses, including highway robbery, vagabondage, popular disturbances, and other offenses that the crown viewed as fundamental threats to France's stability. Until the French Revolution the Maréchaussée retained its dual power to arrest certain kinds of criminals and to judge those it apprehended in military courts, whose verdicts were not subject to appeal.

The number of lawbreakers who experienced this summary justice of the Maréchaussée was limited chiefly by the force's manpower. By 1789 the Maréchaussée mustered only 4,114 officers and men assigned to outposts throughout the kingdom. Such numbers were inadequate for effective rural policing, and in the Bordeaux généralité in 1790, for example, only 111 mounted policemen patrolled 26,000 square miles of territory. Thus the blue-uniformed Maréchaussée officers must have been rare sights indeed in most rural hamlets, and their effectiveness, like that of more traditional police agents, ultimately depended on the cooperation of those they policed. Nevertheless, many French people recognized the importance of professional rural policing, and their demands (cahiers de doléances) for the Estates-General of 1789 frequently called for an improved force. As a result, legislation in 1791 created the gendarmerie nationale, an enlarged Maréchausseé deprived of its judicial authority, that still served rural France in the early twenty-first century.

France also led Europe in the creation of modern urban policing. In his edict of 15 March 1667 Louis XIV created the office of lieutenant général de police de la ville, prévôté et vicomté de Paris. The holder of this office was a magistrate who presided over a police court once weekly but, more importantly, was the administrator charged with maintaining all aspects of order in a growing capital city whose population reached 600,000 by the 1780s. The traditional early modern definition of police functions initially shaped the work of subordinates of the lieutenant général, and street lighting, trash collecting, firefighting, care of foundlings, building inspection, enforcement of commercial regulations, censorship, and other duties occupied many of them. But in 1788 the lieutenant général also commanded 1,931 men who did the work of a modern police force. He deployed various types of uniformed units for mounted and foot patrols of the city, coordinated the efforts of police investigators and spies, and administered police justice through his own court, aided by forty-eight commissioners (commissaires), magistrates stationed throughout the city and empowered to initiate criminal procedures and to order arrests.

The only other early attempts by a European central government at large-scale policing operations originated in the lands of the Spanish monarchy. In their Castilian lands, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella created the Council of the Holy Brotherhood (Santa Hermandad) in 1476 to consolidate locally funded militias into a federation of rural forces that had police and judicial powers, like the Maréchaussée, over a select group of crimes, including murder, rape, highway robbery, and rebellion. Founded in response to the disorders of the succession crisis of the early reign of Isabella in Castile and to lawlessness accompanying the Granada War of 1482–1492, these armed and uniformed forces never developed into a permanent national police. The monarchs never gave the council crown funding, failed to extend it to the rest of their Iberian territories, and disbanded it entirely in 1496 with the end of the Granada War. For over two centuries thereafter, rural policing responsibilities were entirely in the hands of local governments, not all of which had the will or means to fund forces. Even when the crown established a number of royal police units in the eighteenth century, these forces lacked central direction and adequate funding. Only in 1835 did Spain achieve national policing with the advent of the guardia civil.

Spanish monarchs also attempted to establish rural policing in their Netherlands territories. There, a force endowed with both police and judicial powers operated in Artois from about 1517 until the county's annexation by France in 1659. Other such forces emerged in the seventeenth century in the counties of Flanders and Namur, but all had limited effectiveness because of insufficient funding and manpower, problems that continued to hamper the work of police brigades functioning in these areas even after they passed to Austrian Habsburg rule in 1714.

Elsewhere in Europe efforts at improved policing, funded by growing state resources and driven by a rising fear of crime rooted in several developments, appeared only in the eighteenth century. Certainly the growth of a cheap popular press highlighted existing crime for government officials and encouraged them to improve police services. Officials also sought to bolster police resources in response to new threats to public order. Historians of British crime, for example, show that property crime increased in periods of economic distress, and these periods frequently followed the conclusions of the century's many wars. Additionally, population growth and structural economic changes, like enclosure, everywhere produced large numbers of vagrants, who generated considerable fear in settled populations.

Greater London, Europe's largest metropolitan area, produced a number of developments in eighteenth-century policing. Composed of numerous independent municipalities, it presented significant problems in policing. Until 1735 the various municipalities of the metropolis attempted to meet their police needs within the provisions of the Statute of Winchester, that is, with constables and unpaid night watches whose authority ceased at individual parish or municipal boundaries. In 1735 two parishes, St. James, Piccadilly, and St. George, Hanover Square, secured legislation permitting them to levy local taxes to pay permanent, professional patrols for their jurisdictions. Other jurisdictions followed suit, and slowly thereafter local and national authorities created a variety of police units, including highway and river patrols, with general jurisdiction in the metropolitan area. One of these units, the Bow Street Runners, initially privately employed by the London magistrates Henry and John Fielding, was the prototype for the modern detective branch of policing. Only in 1829, however, did Parliament create the London Metropolitan Police, a unified force with jurisdiction encompassing all of Greater London.

The middle and late eighteenth century witnessed experiments in rural policing too, especially on the European continent. Southern German states, including Baden, Bavaria, and Württemburg, employed mounted police units called Hatschiere, composed of former soldiers, to patrol rural areas and especially to search for vagrants. These states also used hussars, cavalrymen drawn from the regular army, for patrols and arrests, but neither these units nor the Hatschiere seem to have had sufficient discipline or numerical strength to provide effective policing. The same problems seem to have afflicted the mounted police units created by Victor Amadeus III of Piedmont-Sardinia in the 1770s and 1780s.

European police agencies remained relatively weak by modern standards through the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the foundations of modern policing are evident in developments in the late early modern period.

Bibliography

Beattie, J. M. Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror. Oxford, 2001.

Brackett, John K. Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence, 1537–1600. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

Emsley, Clive. The English Police: A Political and Social History. 2nd ed. London, 1996.

Kent, Joan R. The English Village Constable, 1580–1642: A Social and Administrative Study. Oxford, 1986.

Lorgnier, Jacques. Maréchaussée, histoire d'une révolution judiciaire et administrative. 2 vols. Paris, 1994.

Lunenfeld, Marvin. The Council of the Santa Hermandad: A Study of the Pacification Forces of Ferdinand and Isabella. Coral Gables, Fla., 1970.

Reynolds, Elaine A. Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720–1830. Stanford, 1998.

Williams, Alan. The Police of Paris, 1718–1789. Baton Rouge, La., 1979.

—JULIUS R. RUFF

To clean up or pick up an area such as policing the firing line for brass.

n.

An armed force for protection and participation.

• Cops At Work Cops at work, on video. Every day.

Quotes:

"He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die." - James Baldwin

"The art of the police is not to see what it is useless that it should see." - Napoleon Bonaparte

"A functioning police state needs no police." - William S. Burroughs

"A really good detective never gets married." - Raymond Chandler

"However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police." - Quentin Crisp

"There is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman." - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

See more famous quotes about Police

Authority symbols, police officers enforce the rules in life. Dreaming about police can indicate apprehension over failure to perform or to honor obligations and commitments. It can also be a warning to avoid reckless behavior.

For other uses, see Police (disambiguation).

German State Police officer in Hamburg.

Polish Police's Anti-Riot Detachment, filming a gathering. The film could later be presented during a trial as evidence, or used in Police training. A water cannon is seen in the background.

New York City Police Department Chevrolet Impala patrol car.

A police service is a public force empowered to enforce the law and to ensure public and social order through the legitimized use of force.

The term is most commonly associated with police services of a state that are authorized to exercise the police power of that state within a defined legal or territorial area of responsibility. The word comes via French Policier from the Latin politia ("civil administration"), which itself derives from the ancient Greek πόλις ("city").^[1]

Contents 1 Overview 2 History 2.1 Ancient China 2.2 Pre-modern Europe 2.3 European development 2.4 19th century development 3 Personnel and organization 3.1 Uniformed police 3.2 Detectives 3.3 Auxiliary 3.4 Specialized units 3.5 Military police 4 Varying jurisdictions 5 Global policing 6 Armament and equipment 6.1 Vehicles 7 Strategies 8 Power restrictions 9 Conduct and accountability 9.1 Use of force 9.2 Protection of individuals 10 International forces 11 See also 12 References 13 External links

Overview

The first police force comparable to present-day police was established in 1667 under King Louis XIV in France, although modern police usually trace their origins to the 1800 establishment of the Marine Police in London, the Glasgow Police, and the Napoleonic police of Paris.^[2][3][4] The first modern police force is also commonly said to be the London Metropolitan Police, established in 1829, which promoted the preventive role of police as a deterrent to urban crime and disorder.^[5]

Law enforcement however constitutes only part of policing activity.^[6] Policing has included an array of activities in different situations, but the predominant ones are concerned with the preservation of order.^[7] In some societies, in the late 18^th century and early 19^th century, these developed within the context of maintaining the class system and the protection of private property.^[8]

Alternative names for police force include constabulary, gendarmerie, police department, police service, crime prevention, protective services, law enforcement agency or Garda Síochána, and members can be police officers, troopers, sheriffs, constables, rangers, peace officers or Garda. Russian police and police of the Soviet-era Eastern Europe are (or were) called militsiya.

History

See also: History of criminal justice

Ancient China

Law enforcement in Ancient China was carried out by "prefects." The notion of a "prefect" in China has existed for thousands of years. The prefecture system developed in both the Chu and Jin kingdoms of the Spring and Autumn period. In Jin, dozens of prefects were spread across the state, each having limited authority and employment period.

In Ancient China, prefects were government officials appointed by local magistrates, who in turn were appointed by the head of state, usually the emperor of the dynasty. The prefects oversaw the civil administration of their "prefecture," or jurisdiction.

Prefects usually reported to the local magistrate, just as modern police report to judges. Under each prefect were "subprefects" who helped collectively with law enforcement of the area. Some prefects were responsible for handling investigations, much like modern police detectives.

Eventually the concept of the "prefecture system" would spread to other cultures such as Korea and Japan. Law enforcement in Ancient China was also relatively progressive, allowing for female prefects. Some examples of ancient Chinese prefects include: Chong Fu - prefect of the Ying District in the East Han Dynasty and Ching Chow - prefect of the modern Shang-tung Province. An example of a female prefect would by Lady Qu^[9] of Wuding (serving 1531-ca. 1557).

Recent portrayals of prefects in modern popular culture include Jet Li’s portrayal of the nameless prefect in the movie Hero.

Pre-modern Europe

In Ancient Greece, publicly-owned slaves were used by magistrates as police. In Athens, a group of 300 Scythian slaves was used to guard public meetings to keep order and for crowd control, and also assisted with dealing with criminals, handling prisoners, and making arrests. Other duties associated with modern policing, such as investigating crimes, were left to the citizens themselves.^[10]

Before its decline, the Roman Empire had a relatively effective law enforcement system. When under the reign of Augustus the capital had grown to almost one million inhabitants, he created 14 wards, which were protected by seven squads of 1,000 men called "Vigiles," who guarded against fires and served as nightwatchmen.

If necessary, they might have called the Praetorian Guard for assistance. Beginning in the 5th century, policing became a function of clan chiefs and heads of state.^{[citation needed]}

The Anglo-Saxon system of maintaining public order since the Norman conquest was a private system of tithings, led by a constable, which was based on a social obligation for the good conduct of the others; more common was that local lords and nobles were responsible to maintain order in their lands, and often appointed a constable, sometimes unpaid, to enforce the law.

European development

Modern police in Europe has a precedent in the Hermandad, literally "brotherhood" in Spanish, a peacekeeping association of armed individuals, a characteristic of municipal life in medieval Spain, especially in Castile. As medieval Spanish kings were often unable to offer adequate protection, protective municipal leagues began to emerge in the 12th century against bandits and other rural criminals, as well as against the lawless nobility or to support a one or another claimant to the crown.

These organisations were to be temporary, but became a long standing fixture of Spain. The first recorded case of the formation of an hermandad occurred when the towns and the peasantry of the north united to police the pilgrim road to Santiago in Galicia, and protect the pilgrims against robber knights.

Throughout the Middle Ages such alliances were frequently formed by combinations of towns to protect the roads connecting them, and were occasionally extended to political purposes. They acted to some extent like the Fehmic courts of Germany. Among the most powerful was the league of North Castilian and Basque ports, the Hermandad de las Marismas: Toledo, Talavera, and Villa Real.

As one of their first acts after the war of succession, Ferdinand and Isabella established the centrally organized and efficient Holy Hermandad (Santa Hermandad) with themselves at the head. They adapted an existing hermandad to the purpose of a general police acting under officials appointed by themselves, and endowed with large powers of summary jurisdiction even in capital cases. The original hermandades continued to serve as modest local police units until their final suppression in 1835.

In Western culture, the contemporary concept of a police paid by the government was developed by French legal scholars and practitioners in the 17th and early 18th centuries, notably with Nicolas Delamare's Traité de la Police ("Treatise on the Police"), first published in 1705. The German Polizeiwissenschaft (Science of Police) was also an important theoretical formulation of police.

The first police force in the modern sense was created by the government of King Louis XIV in 1667 to police the city of Paris, then the largest city in Europe. The royal edict, registered by the Parlement of Paris on March 15, 1667 created the office of lieutenant général de police ("lieutenant general of police"), who was to be the head of the new Paris police force, and defined the task of the police as "ensuring the peace and quiet of the public and of private individuals, purging the city of what may cause disturbances, procuring abundance, and having each and everyone live according to their station and their duties".

This office was first held by Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, who had 44 commissaires de police (police commissioners) under his authority. In 1709, these commissioners were assisted by inspecteurs de police (police inspectors). The city of Paris was divided into 16 districts policed by the commissaires, each assigned to a particular district and assisted by a growing bureaucracy. The scheme of the Paris police force was extended to the rest of France by a royal edict of October 1699, resulting in the creation of lieutenants general of police in all large French cities and towns.

As conceptualized by the Polizeiwissenschaft, the police had an economic and social duty ("procuring abundance"). It was in charge of demographics concerns and of empowering the population, which, according to mercantilist theory, was to be the main strength of the state. Thus, its functions largely overreached simple law enforcement activities and included public health concerns, urban planning (which was important because of the miasma theory of disease; thus, cemeteries were moved out of town, etc.), and surveillance of prices.^[11]

Development of modern police was contemporary to the formation of the state, later defined by sociologist Max Weber as achieving a "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force" and which was primarily exercised by the police and the military. Marxist theory situates the development of the modern state as part of the rise of capitalism, in which the police are one component of the bourgeoisie's repressive apparatus for subjugating the working class.

19th century development

Mounted officer of the British Metropolitan Police, the first modern police force^[5]

After the French Revolution, Napoléon I reorganized the police in Paris and other cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants on February 17, 1800 as the Prefecture of Police. On March 12, 1829, a government decree created the first uniformed police in France, known as sergents de ville ("city sergeants"), which the Paris Prefecture of Police's website claims were the first uniformed policemen in the world.^[12]

In the United Kingdom, the development of police forces was much slower than in the rest of Europe. The British police function was historically performed by private watchmen (existing from 1500 on), thief-takers, and so on. The former were funded by private individuals and organisations and the latter by privately-funded rewards for catching criminals, who would then be compelled to return stolen property or pay restitution.

In 1737, George II began paying some London and Middlesex watchmen with tax moneys, beginning the shift to government control. In 1750, Henry Fielding began organizing a force of quasi-professional constables. The Macdaniel affair added further impetus for a publicly-salaried police force that did not depend on rewards. Nonetheless, In 1828, there were privately financed police units in no fewer than 45 parishes within a 10-mile radius of London.

The word "police" was borrowed from French into the English language in the 18th century, but for a long time it applied only to French and continental European police forces. The word, and the concept of police itself, was "disliked as a symbol of foreign oppression" (according to Britannica 1911).

Prior to the 19th century, the only official use of the word "police" recorded in the United Kingdom was the appointment of Commissioners of Police for Scotland in 1714 and the creation of the Marine Police in 1798 (set up to protect merchandise at the Port of London). Even today, many British police forces are suffixed with "Constabulary" rather than "Police".

On June 30, 1800, the authorities of Glasgow, Scotland successfully petitioned the government to pass the Glasgow Police Act establishing the City of Glasgow Police. This was the first professional police service in the country and differed from previous law enforcement in that it was a preventive police force. Other Scottish towns soon followed suit and set up their own police forces through acts of parliament.^[13]

The first organized police force in Ireland came about through the Peace Preservation Act of 1814, but the Irish Constabulary Act of 1822 marked the true beginning of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Among its first duties was the forcible seizure of tithes during the "Tithe War" on behalf of the Anglican clergy from the mainly Catholic population as well as the Presbyterian minority.

The Act established a force in each barony with chief constables and inspectors general under the control of the civil administration at Dublin Castle. By 1841 this force numbered over 8,600 men.

The force had been rationalized and reorganized in an 1836 act and the first constabulary code of regulations was published in 1837. The discipline was tough and the pay poor. The police also faced unrest among the Irish rural poor, manifested in organizations like the Ribbonmen, which attacked landlords and their property.

In London, night watchmen were the first paid law enforcement body in the country, augmenting the force of unpaid constables. They guarded the streets since 1663. On September 29, 1829, the Metropolitan Police Act was passed by Parliament, allowing Sir Robert Peel, the then home secretary, to found the London Metropolitan Police.

"Albertine at the Police Doctor's Waiting Room", 1885-87 painting by the Norwegian writer and painter Christian Krohg illustrating his then very controversial novel Albertine about the life of a prostitute

These police are often referred to as ´Bobbies´ or 'Peelers' after Sir Robert (Bobby) Peel, who introduced the Police Act. They became a model for the police forces in most countries, such as the United States, and most of the British Empire. Bobbies can still be found in many parts of the Commonwealth of Nations. The primary role of the police in Britain was keeping the Queen's Peace, which continues into the present day.^[14]

In Canada, the Toronto Police was founded in 1834, making it one of the first municipal police departments in North America. It was followed in 1838 by police forces in Montreal and Quebec City.

In the United States, the first organized police service was established in Boston in 1838, New York in 1844, and Philadelphia in 1854. However, in the Founding Era, and even well into the 20th century in some parts of the country, law enforcement was done by private citizens acting as militia.^{[citation needed]}

In Lebanon, modern police were established in 1861, with creation of the Gendarmerie.^[15]

In Australia with the passing of the Police Regulation Act, 1862, the New South Wales Police Force was established and essentially tightly regulated and centralised all of the police forces operating throughout the Colony of New South Wales.

Personnel and organization

In most Western police forces, perhaps the most significant division is between preventive (uniformed) police and detectives. Terminology varies from country to country.

Police functions include protecting life and property, enforcing criminal law, criminal investigations, regulating traffic, crowd control, and other public safety duties.

Uniformed police

Brazilian Federal Highway Police at work.

Preventive Police, also called Uniform Branch, Uniformed Police, Uniform Division, Administrative Police, Order Police, or Patrol, designates the police which patrol and respond to emergencies and other incidents, as opposed to detective services. As the name "uniformed" suggests, they wear uniforms and perform functions that require an immediate recognition of an officer's legal authority, such as traffic control, stopping and detaining motorists, and more active crime response and prevention.

Preventive police almost always make up the bulk of a police service's personnel. In Australia and Britain, patrol personnel are also known as "general duties" officers.^[16] Atypically, Brazil's preventive police are known as Military Police.^[17]

Detectives

New South Wales Police Force officers search the vehicle of a suspected drug smuggler at a border crossing. Wentworth, New South Wales, Australia

Police detectives are responsible for investigations and detective work. Detectives may be called Investigations Police, Judiciary/Judicial Police, and Criminal Police. In the UK, they are often referred to by the name of their department, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). Detectives typically make up roughly 15%-25% of a police service's personnel.

Detectives, in contrast to uniform police, typically wear 'business attire' in bureaucratic and investigative functions where a uniformed presence would be either a distraction or intimidating, but a need to establish police authority still exists. "Plainclothes" officers dress in attire consistent with that worn by the general public for purposes of blending in.

In some cases, police are assigned to work "undercover", where they conceal their police identity to investigate crimes, such as organized crime or narcotics crime, that are unsolvable by other means. In some cases this type of policing shares aspects with espionage.

Despite popular conceptions promoted by movies and television, many US police departments prefer not to maintain officers in non-patrol bureaus and divisions beyond a certain period of time, such as in the detective bureau, and instead maintain policies that limit service in such divisions to a specified period of time, after which officers must transfer out or return to patrol duties.^{[citation needed]} This is done in part based upon the perception that the most important and essential police work is accomplished on patrol in which officers become acquainted with their beats, prevent crime by their presence, respond to crimes in progress, manage crises, and practice their skills.^{[citation needed]}

Detectives, by contrast, usually investigate crimes after they have occurred and after patrol officers have responded first to a situation. Investigations often take weeks or months to complete, during which time detectives spend much of their time away from the streets, in interviews and courtrooms, for example. Rotating officers also promotes cross-training in a wider variety of skills, and serves to prevent "cliques" that can contribute to corruption or other unethical behavior.

Auxiliary

Police may also take on auxiliary administrative duties, such as issuing firearms licenses. The extent that police have these functions varies among countries, with police in France, Germany, and other continental European countries handling such tasks to a greater extent than British counterparts.^[16]

Specialized units

After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the Mumbai Police created specialized, quick response teams to deal with terror threats.

Specialized preventive and detective groups exist within many law enforcement organizations either for dealing with particular types of crime, such as traffic law enforcement and crash investigation, homicide, or fraud; or for situations requiring specialized skills, such as underwater search, aviation, explosive device disposal ("bomb squad"), and computer crime.

Most larger jurisdictions also employ specially-selected and trained quasi-military units armed with military-grade weapons for the purposes of dealing with particularly violent situations beyond the capability of a patrol officer response, including high-risk warrant service and barricaded suspects. In the United States these units go by a variety of names, but are commonly known as SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) teams.

In counter insurgency type campaigns, select and specially trained units of police armed and equipped as light infantry have been designated as police field forces who perform paramilitary type patrols and ambushes whilst retaining their police powers in areas that were highly dangerous.^[18]

Because their situational mandate typically focuses on removing innocent bystanders from dangerous people and dangerous situations, not violent resolution, they are often equipped with non-lethal tactical tools like chemical agents, "flashbang" and concussion grenades, and rubber bullets. The London Metropolitan police's Specialist Firearms Command (CO19)^[19] is a group of armed police used in dangerous situations including hostage taking, armed robbery/assault and terrorism.

Military police

Military police may refer to:

• a section of the military solely responsible for policing the armed forces (referred to as provosts)
• a section of the military responsible for policing in both the armed forces and in the civilian population (most gendarmeries, such as the French Gendarmerie)
• a section of the military solely responsible for policing the civilian population (such as the Romanian Gendarmerie)
• the civilian preventative police of a Brazilian state (Policia Militar)

Varying jurisdictions

Police forces are usually organized and funded by some level of government. The level of government responsible for policing varies from place to place, and may be at the national, regional or local level. In some places there may be multiple police forces operating in the same area, with different ones having jurisdiction according to the type of crime or other circumstances.

For example in the UK policing is primarily the responsibility of a regional police force; however specialist units exist at the national level. In the US policing there is typically a state police force, but a municipality may have its own police force. National police agencies also have jurisdiction over serious crimes or those with an interstate component.

In addition to conventional urban or regional police forces, there are other police forces with specialized functions or jurisdiction. In the United States, the federal government has a number of police forces with their own specialized jurisdictions.

Some example are the Federal Protective Service, which patrols and protects government buildings; the postal police, which protect postal buildings, vehicles and items; the Park Police, which protect national parks, or Amtrak Police which patrol Amtrak stations and trains..

There are also some government agencies which perform police functions in addition to other duties. The U.S. Coast Guard carries out many police functions for boaters.

In major cities, there may be a separate police agency for public transit systems, such as the New York City Port Authority Police or the MTA police, or for major government functions, such as sanitation, or environmental functions.

A Police Service of Northern Ireland/Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks in Northern Ireland. The high walls are to protect against mortar bomb attacks.

Global policing

Policing plays an increasingly important role in United Nations peacekeeping and this looks set to grow in the years ahead, especially as the international community seeks to develop the rule of law and reform security institutions in States recovering from conflict.^[20]

Armament and equipment

In many jurisdictions, police officers carry firearms, primarily handguns, in the normal course of their duties. In the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, and New Zealand, with the exception of specialist units, officers do not carry firearms as a matter of course.

Police often have specialist units for handling armed offenders, and similar dangerous situations, and can (depending on local laws), in some extreme circumstances, call on the military (since Military Aid to the Civil Power is a role of many armed forces). Perhaps the most high-profile example of this was, in 1980 the Metropolitan Police handing control of the Iranian Embassy Siege to the Special Air Service.

They can also be equipped with non-lethal (more accurately known as "less than lethal" or "less-lethal") weaponry, particularly for riot control. Non-lethal weapons include batons, riot control agents, rubber bullets and electroshock weapons. The use of firearms or deadly force is typically a last resort only to be used when necessary to save human life, although some jurisdictions (such as Brazil) allow its use against fleeing felons and escaped convicts. Police officers often carry handcuffs to restrain suspects.

Modern police forces make extensive use of radio communications equipment, carried both on the person and installed in vehicles, to co-ordinate their work, share information, and get help quickly. In recent years, vehicle-installed computers have enhanced the ability of police communications, enabling easier dispatching of calls, criminal background checks on persons of interest to be completed in a matter of seconds, and updating the officer's daily activity log and other required reports on a real-time basis. Other common pieces of police equipment include flashlights/torches, whistles, and police notebooks and "ticketbooks" or citations.

Vehicles

The black and white pattern of an LAPD Ford Crown Victoria patrol car.

Old model New Zealand Police highway patrol vehicle

Toronto Police 2008 Chevrolet Suburban police vehicle

Portland Police 2008 Dodge Charger Police car

Main article: Police car

Police vehicles are used for detaining, patrolling and transporting. The common Police patrol vehicle is an improved four door sedan (saloon in British English). Police vehicles are usually marked with appropriate logos and are equipped with sirens and lightbars to aid in making others aware of police presence.

Unmarked vehicles are used primarily for sting operations or apprehending criminals without alerting them to their presence. Some police forces use unmarked or minimally marked cars for traffic law enforcement, since drivers slow down at the sight of marked police vehicles and unmarked vehicles make it easier for officers to catch speeders and traffic violators. This practice is controversial, with for example New York State banning this practice in 1996 on the grounds that it endangered motorists who might be pulled over by people impersonating police officers.^[21]

Motorcycles are also commonly used, particularly in locations that a car may not be able to access, to control potential public order situations involving meetings of motorcyclists and often in escort duties where the motorcycle policeman can quickly clear a path for the escorted vehicle. Bicycle patrols are used in some areas because they allow for more open interaction with the public. In addition, their quieter operation can facilitate approaching suspects unawares and can help in pursuing them attempting to escape on foot.

Police departments use an array of specialty vehicles such as helicopters, airplanes, watercraft, command post, vans, trucks, all terrain vehicles, motorcycles, and SWAT armored vehicles.

Police Lenco Bearcat CBRNE Armored Rescue Vehicle Metropolitan Nashville Police SWAT

Strategies

The advent of the police car, two-way radio, and telephone in the early 20th century transformed policing into a reactive strategy that focused on responding to calls for service.^[22] With this transformation, police command and control became more centralized.

In the United States, August Vollmer introduced other reforms, including education requirements for police officers.^[23] O.W. Wilson, a student of Vollmer, helped reduce corruption and introduce professionalism in Wichita, Kansas, and later in the Chicago Police Department.^[24] Strategies employed by O.W. Wilson included rotating officers from community to community to reduce their vulnerability to corruption, establishing of a non-partisan police board to help govern the police force, a strict merit system for promotions within the department, and an aggressive recruiting drive with higher police salaries to attract professionally qualified officers.^[25] During the professionalism era of policing, law enforcement agencies concentrated on dealing with felonies and other serious crime, rather than broader focus on crime prevention.^[26]

Anti-riot armoured vehicle of the police of the Canton of Vaud in Lausanne, Switzerland

The Kansas City Preventive Patrol study in the 1970s found this approach to policing to be ineffective. Patrol officers in cars were disconnected from the community, and had insufficient contact and interaction with the community.^[27] In the 1980s and 1990s, many law enforcement agencies began to adopt community policing strategies, and others adopted problem-oriented policing.

Broken windows policing was another, related approach introduced in the 1980s by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, who suggested that police should pay greater attention to minor "quality of life" offenses and disorderly conduct. This method was first introduced and made popular by New York City Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, in the early 1990s.

The concept behind this method is simple: broken windows, graffiti, and other physical destruction or degradation of property, greatly increases the chances of more criminal activities and destruction of property. When criminals see the abandoned vehicles, trash, and deplorable property, they assume that authorities do not care and do not take active approaches to correct problems in these areas. Therefore, correcting the small problems prevents more serious criminal activity.^[28]

Building upon these earlier models, intelligence-led policing has emerged as the dominant philosophy guiding police strategy. Intelligence-led policing and problem-oriented policing are complementary strategies, both which involve systematic use of information.^[29] Although it still lacks a universally accepted definition, the crux of intelligence-led policing is an emphasis on the collection and analysis of information to guide police operations, rather than the reverse.^[30]

Power restrictions

ACT Police breath testing and command truck in Canberra Australia

In many nations, criminal procedure law has been developed to regulate officers' discretion, so that they do not arbitrarily or unjustly exercise their powers of arrest, search and seizure, and use of force. In the United States, Miranda v. Arizona led to the widespread use of Miranda warnings or constitutional warnings.

Police in the United States are also prohibited from holding criminal suspects for more than a reasonable amount of time (usually 72 hours) before arraignment, using torture to extract confessions, using excessive force to effect an arrest, and searching suspects' bodies or their homes without a warrant obtained upon a showing of probable cause.

Using deception for confessions is permitted, but not coercion. There are exceptions or exigent circumstances such as an articulated need to disarm a suspect or searching a suspect who has already been arrested (Search Incident to an Arrest). The Posse Comitatus Act severely restricts the use of the military for police activity, giving added importance to police SWAT units.

British police officers are governed by similar rules, particularly those introduced under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE), but generally have greater powers. They may, for example, legally search any suspect who has been arrested, or their vehicles, home or business premises, without a warrant, and may seize anything they find in a search as evidence.

All police officers in the United Kingdom, whatever their actual rank, are 'constables' in terms of their legal position. This means that a newly appointed constable has the same arrest powers as a Chief Constable or Commissioner. However, certain higher ranks have additional powers to authorize certain aspects of police operations, such as a power to authorize a search of a suspect's house (section 18 PACE) by an officer of the rank of Inspector, or the power to authorize a suspect's detention beyond 24 hours by a Superintendent.

Conduct and accountability

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2009)

Motorcycle of the Italian Carabinieri

Police services commonly include units for investigating crimes committed by the police themselves. These units are typically called Inspectorate-General, or in the USA, "internal affairs". In some countries separate organizations outside the police exist for such purposes, such as the British Independent Police Complaints Commission.

Likewise, some state and local jurisdictions, for example, Springfield, Illinois^[31] have similar outside review organizations. The Police Service of Northern Ireland is investigated by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, an external agency set up as a result of the Patten report into policing the province. In the Republic of Ireland the Garda Síochána is investigated by the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission, an independent force that replaced the Garda Complaints Board in May 2007.

The Special Investigations Unit of Ontario, Canada, is one of only a few civilian agencies around the world responsible for investigating circumstances involving police and civilians that have resulted in a death, serious injury, or allegations of sexual assault.

Lamborghini Gallardo of the Italian State Police

Norwegian mounted policeman, Oslo

A policeman riding a camel in Giza, Egypt

Use of force

Police forces also find themselves under criticism for their use of force, particularly deadly force. Specifically, tension increases when a police officer of one ethnic group harms or kills a suspect of another one.^{[citation needed]} In the United States, such events occasionally spark protests and accusations of racism against police and allegations that police departments practice racial profiling.

In the United States since the 1960s, concern over such issues has increasingly weighed upon law enforcement agencies, courts and legislatures at every level of government. Incidents such as the 1965 Watts Riots, the videotaped 1991 beating by Los Angeles Police officers of Rodney King, and the riot following their acquittal have been suggested by some people to be evidence that U.S. police are dangerously lacking in appropriate controls.

The fact that this trend has occurred contemporaneously with the rise of the US civil rights movement, the "War on Drugs," and a precipitous rise in violent crime from the 1960s to the 1990s has made questions surrounding the role, administration and scope of police authority increasingly complicated.^{[citation needed]}

Police departments and the local governments that oversee them in some jurisdictions have attempted to mitigate some of these issues through community outreach programs and community policing to make the police more accessible to the concerns of local communities, by working to increase hiring diversity, by updating training of police in their responsibilities to the community and under the law, and by increased oversight within the department or by civilian commissions.

In cases in which such measures have been lacking or absent, civil law suits have been brought by the United States Department of Justice against local law enforcement agencies, authorized under the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This has compelled local departments to make organizational changes, enter into consent decree settlements to adopt such measures, and submit to oversight by the Justice Department.^{[32][citation needed]}

Protection of individuals

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled numerous times since 1856 that law enforcement officers have no duty to protect any individual, despite the motto "protect and serve". Their duty is to enforce the law in general. The first such case was in 1856 (South v. Maryland) and the most recent in 2005 (Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales).^[33]

In contrast, the police are entitled to protect private rights in some jurisdictions. To ensure that the police would not interfere into the regular competencies of the courts of law, some police acts require that the police may only interfere in such cases where protection from courts cannot be obtained in time, and where, without interference of the police, the realization of the private right would be impeded.^[34] This would, for example, allow police to establish a restaurant guest's identity and forward it to the inn-keeper in a case where the guest cannot pay the bill at nighttime because his wallet had just been stolen from the restaurant table.

In addition, there are Federal Law Enforcement agencies in the United States whose mission includes providing protection for executives such as the President and accompanying family members, visiting foreign dignitaries, and other high-ranking individuals.^[35] Such agencies include The United States Secret Service and the United States Park Police.

International forces

Main article: Law enforcement by country

In many countries, particularly those with a federal system of government, there may be several police or police-like organizations, each serving different levels of government and enforcing different subsets of the applicable law. The United States has a highly decentralized and fragmented system of law enforcement, with over 17,000 state and local law enforcement agencies.^[36]

Some countries, such as Chile, Israel, the Philippines, France, Austria, New Zealand and South Africa, use a centralized system of policing.^[37] Other countries have multiple police forces, but for the most part their jurisdictions do not overlap. In the United States however, several different law enforcement agencies may have authority in a particular jurisdiction at the same time, each with their own command.

Other countries where jurisdiction of multiple police agencies overlap, include Guardia Civil and the Policía Nacional in Spain , the Polizia di Stato and Carabinieri in Italy and the Police Nationale and Gendarmerie Nationale.^[16]

Most countries are members of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), established to detect and fight trans-national crime and provide for international co-operation and co-ordination of other police activities, such as notifying relatives of the death of foreign nationals. Interpol does not conduct investigations nor arrests by itself, but only serves as a central point for information on crime, suspects and criminals. Political crimes are excluded from its competencies.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Police

Look up police in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Chief of police
• Criminal justice
• Fraternal Order of Police
• Law enforcement agency
• Law enforcement and society
• Law enforcement by country
• The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc
• Police academy
• Police certificate
• Police state
• Police training officer
• Public administration
• Public Security
• Sheriff

Lists

• List of basic law enforcement topics
• List of countries by size of police forces
• List of law enforcement agencies
• List of protective service agencies
• Police rank

References

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2. ^ Dinsmor, Alastair (Winter 2003). "Glasgow Police Pioneers". The Scotia News. http://www.scotia-news.com/issue5/ISSUE05a.htm. Retrieved on 2007-01-10. 
3. ^ "History". Marine Support Unit. Metropolitan Police. http://www.met.police.uk/msu/history.htm. Retrieved on 2007-02-10. 
4. ^ "La Lieutenance Générale de Police". La Préfecture de Police fête ses 200 ans Juillet 1800 - Juillet 2000. http://www.prefecture-police-paris.interieur.gouv.fr/documentation/bicentenaire/theme_expo1.htm. 
5. ^ ^{a b} Brodeur, Jean-Paul; Eds., Kevin R. E. McCormick and Livy A. Visano (1992). ”High Policing and Low Policing: Remarks about the Policing of Political Activities,” Understanding Policing. Canadian Scholars’ Press. pp. 284–285, 295. ISBN 1-55130-005-2. 
6. ^ Walker, Samuel (1977). A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism. Lexington, MT: Lexington Books. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-6690-1292-7. 
7. ^ Neocleous, Mark (2004). Fabricating Social Order: A Critical History of Police Power. Pluto Press. pp. 93–94. ISBN 978-0-7453-1489-1. 
8. ^ Siegel, Larry J. (2005). Criminolgy. Thomson Wadsworth. pp. 515,516.  [1]
9. ^ Whittaker, Jake. "UC Davis East Asian Studies". University of California, Davis. <http://eastasian.ucdavis.edu/research.htm>.
10. ^ Hunter, Virginia J. (1994). Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Lawsuits, 420-320 B.C.. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-1-4008-0392-7. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5349.html. 
11. ^ Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 1977-78 course (published 2004)
12. ^ "Bicentenaire : theme_expo4". Prefecture-police-paris.interieur.gouv.fr. http://www.prefecture-police-paris.interieur.gouv.fr/documentation/bicentenaire/theme_expo4.htm. Retrieved on 2009-06-21. 
13. ^ "Glasgow Police". Scotia-news.com. http://www.scotia-news.com/issue5/ISSUE05a.htm. Retrieved on 2009-06-21. 
14. ^ "Respect - Homepage". Together.gov.uk. http://www.together.gov.uk/article.asp?c=442&aid=1275. Retrieved on 2009-06-21. ^{[dead link]}
15. ^ "Historical overview". Interior Security Forces (Lebanon). http://www.isf.gov.lb/English/LeftMenu/General+Info/History/. Retrieved on 2007-06-26. 
16. ^ ^{a b c} Bayley, David H. (1979). "Police Function, Structure, and Control in Western Europe and North America: Comparative and Historical Studies". Crime & Justice 1: pp. 109–143. doi:10.1086/449060. NCJ 63672. 
17. ^ "PMMG". Policiamilitar.mg.gov.br. https://www.policiamilitar.mg.gov.br/_pmmg.htm. Retrieved on 2009-06-21. 
18. ^ p.Davies, Bruce & McKay, Gary The Men Who Persevered:The AATTV 2005 Bruce & Unwin
19. ^ formerly named SO19 "Metropolitan Police Service - Central Operations, Specialist Firearms unit (CO19)". Metropolitan Police Service. http://www.met.police.uk/co19/. Retrieved on 2008-08-04. 
20. ^ "Top UN police, rule of law officials meet in Italy to discuss global policing". Un.org. 2008-02-07. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=25538&Cr=UN&Cr1=police. Retrieved on 2009-06-21. 
21. ^ Dao, James (1996-04-18). "Pataki Curbs Unmarked Cars' Use - The". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9800E1DB1E39F93BA25757C0A960958260&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/R/Roads%20and%20Traffic. Retrieved on 2009-06-21. 
22. ^ Reiss Jr, Albert J. (1992). "Police Organization in the Twentieth Century". Crime and Justice 51: 51. doi:10.1086/449193. NCJ 138800. 
23. ^ "Finest of the Finest". TIME Magazine. February 18, 1966. http://jcgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,899019,00.html. 
24. ^ "Guide to the Orlando Winfield Wilson Papers, ca. 1928-1972". Online Archive of California. http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=tf3v19n6s0&doc.view=entire_text. Retrieved on 2006-10-20. 
25. ^ "Chicago Chooses Criminologist to Head and Clean Up the Police". United Press International/The New York Times. February 22, 1960. 
26. ^ Kelling, George L., Mary A. Wycoff (December 2002). Evolving Strategy of Policing: Case Studies of Strategic Change. National Institute of Justice. NCJ 198029. 
27. ^ Kelling, George L., Tony Pate, Duane Dieckman, Charles E. Brown (1974). "The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment - A Summary Report" (PDF). Police Foundation. http://www.policefoundation.org/pdf/kcppe.pdf. 
28. ^ Kelling, George L., James Q. Wilson (March 1982). "Broken Windows" (subscription). Atlantic Monthly. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198203/broken-windows. 
29. ^ Tilley, Nick (2003). Problem-Oriented Policing, Intelligence-Led Policing and the National Intelligence Model. Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, University College London. http://www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk/publications/short_reports/problem_oriented_policing.php. 
30. ^ "Intelligence-led policing: A Definition". Royal Canadian Mounted Police. http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/crimint/intelligence_e.htm. Retrieved on 2007-06-15. 
31. ^ Amanda Reavy. "Police review board gets started". The State Journal-Register Online. http://www.sj-r.com/sections/news/stories/112655.asp. 
32. ^ Walker, Samuel (2005). The New World of Police Accountability. Sage. pp. p. 5. 
33. ^ "Castle Rock v. Gonzales". Cornell University Law School. http://straylight.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-278.ZS.html. Retrieved on 2009-03-21. 
34. ^ See e.g. § 1 section 2 of the Police Act of North Rhine-Westphalia:"Police Act of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia" (in German). polizei-nrw.de. Land Nordrhein-Westfalen. http://www1.polizei-nrw.de/im/Recht/Polizeigesetz/. Retrieved on 2008-08-10. 
35. ^ The United States Park Police Webpage, http://www.nps.gov/uspp
36. ^ "Law Enforcement Statistics". Bureau of Justice Statistics. http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/lawenf.htm. Retrieved on 2007-05-23. 
37. ^ Das, Dilip K., Otwin Marenin (2000). Challenges of Policing Democracies: A World Perspective. Routledge. pp. p. 17. 

External links

• United Nations Police Division.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - politi
v. tr. - forsyne med politi, holde orden, overvåge

idioms:

• police constable    politibetjent
• police dog    politihund
• police force    politistyrke
• police officer    politibetjent
• police state    politistat

Nederlands (Dutch)
politie, van de politie, controleren

Français (French)
n. - (gén) la police, la gendarmerie, policiers, gendarmes
v. tr. - maintenir l'ordre dans, surveiller, contrôler l'application de

idioms:

• police constable    agent de police
• police dog    chien policier
• police force    forces de l'ordre
• police officer    policier
• police state    État policier

Deutsch (German)
n. - Polizei
v. - polizeilich überwachen

idioms:

• police constable    Polizist
• police dog    Polizeihund
• police force    Polizeitruppe, Polizei
• police officer    Polizeibeamter
• police state    Polizeistaat

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - αστυνομία, αστυνομική δύναμη, αστυνομικοί
v. - αστυνομεύω, (μτφ.) επιτηρώ, ελέγχω, τηρώ

idioms:

• police constable    αστυφύλακας
• police dog    αστυνομικός σκύλος
• police force    αστυνομία, αστυνομικό σώμα
• police officer    αστυνομικός
• police state    αστυνομικό κράτος

Italiano (Italian)
polizia, commissariato, stazione di polizia, poliziesco

idioms:

• police constable    poliziotto
• police dog    cane poliziotto
• police force    polizia
• police officer    agente di polizia
• police state    stato di polizia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - polícia (f), limpeza de quartel (f)
v. - policiar, vigiar, limar

idioms:

• police constable    comissário de polícia
• police dog    cão policial
• police force    força policial
• police officer    oficial de polícia
• police state    estado policial, estado autoritário

Русский (Russian)
полиция, полицейский, обеспечивать порядок, нести охрану

idioms:

• police constable    констебль
• police dog    полицейская собака
• police force    полиция
• police officer    полицейский
• police state    полицейское государство

Español (Spanish)
n. - policía, comisaría
v. tr. - gobernar, mantener el orden, hacer vigilar

idioms:

• police constable    policía, guardia
• police dog    perro policía
• police force    policía, cuerpo de policía
• police officer    agente de policía
• police state    estado policíaco

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - polis
v. - bevaka, kontrollera, hålla ordning, övervaka

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
警察, 警察当局, 管辖, 维持治安

idioms:

• police constable    警察, 警员
• police dog    警犬
• police force    警察部门, 警察机关, 一队警察, 维持和平部队
• police officer    警官, 警员
• police state    警察国家, 极权国家

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 警察, 警察當局
v. tr. - 管轄, 維持治安

idioms:

• police constable    警察, 警員
• police dog    警犬
• police force    警察部門, 警察機關, 一隊警察, 維持和平部隊
• police officer    警官, 警員
• police state    警察國家, 極權國家

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 경찰, 치안대, 정돈
v. tr. - ~에 경찰을 두다, (막사 등을) 청소하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 警察, 警官, 警備隊
v. - 治安を保つ, 管理する

idioms:

• police constable    巡査, 警官
• police dog    警察犬
• police force    警察, 警察隊
• police officer    警官, 警察官, 巡査
• police state    警察国家

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) بوليس, شرطي (فعل) يحافظ على الأمن والنظام‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮משטרה, שוטרים‬
v. tr. - ‮שמר על הסדר, פיקח על‬

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