Special Branch is a label customarily used to identify units responsible for matters of national security in British and Commonwealth police forces, as well as in the Royal Thai Police. A Special Branch unit acquires and develops intelligence, usually of a political nature, and conducts investigations to protect the State from perceived threats of subversion—particularly terrorism and other extremist activity.
The first Special Branch, or Special Irish Branch, as it was known, was a unit of London's Metropolitan Police formed in March 1883 to combat the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The name became Special Branch as the unit's remit widened.
Read more about Special Branch: Australia, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Fiji, India, Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, United Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the words special and/or branch:
“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“That man’s the true Conservative
Who lops the mouldered branch away.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)