Police

:This article is about law enforcement. For the band, see The Police. For the town in Poland, see Police, Poland.

Policing structures

Most police forces contain subgroups whose job it is to investigate particular types of crime.

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In most Western police forces, perhaps the most significant division is between "uniformed" police and detectives. Uniformed police, as the name suggests, wear uniforms, and their jobs involve overt policing operations, traffic control, and more active crime response and prevention. Detectives, by contrast, wear 'business attire' when their job is to more professonally investigate crimes, usually on a longer-term basis. There are also "plainclothes" officers, who are required to dress in more casual attire for purposes of blending in better. In some cases, police are assigned to work "undercover", where they do not identify themselves as police, sometimes for long periods, to investigate crimes, particularly organized crime, unsolvable by other means. This type of policing shares much with espionage.

Related Topics:
Detective - Uniform - Traffic - Organized crime - Espionage

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Specialized groups exist within the branches either for dealing with particular types of crime (for instance, traffic policing, murder, or fraud) or because of particular specialised skills they have (for instance, diving, operating helicopters, bomb squad, and so on). Most larger jurisdictions also retain specially-trained quasi-military squads armed with small arms for the purposes of dealing with particularly violent situations. These are sometimes called SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) teams.

Related Topics:
Murder - Fraud - Helicopter - Bomb squad - Small arms - SWAT

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