Military Police - United States

United States

Marine Corps Military Police Badge Navy Master-at-Arms Badge Air Force Secuirity Forces Badge Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Badge Marine Corps Criminal Investigation Division Special Agent Badge Air Force Office of Special Investigation Special Agent Badge Coast Guard Investigative Service Special Agent Badge

Each branch of the military of the United States maintains its own military police force, except for the US Coast Guard which is its own law enforcement agency; the coast guard uses its shore patrol, Reserve Investigators, and members of the Coast Guard Investigative Service to regulate its own population. Here is a list of military police forces:

  • Military Police Corps/Office of the Provost Marshal General—United States Army
  • Provost Marshal's Office—United States Marine Corps
  • Masters-at-Arms branch (occasionally aided by temporary members of the Shore Patrol)—United States Navy
  • Air Force Security Forces (formerly known as Military Police, Air Police and Security Police)—United States Air Force
  • U.S. Naval Security Forces (NSF)

Each service also maintains uniformed civilian police departments. They are referred to as Department of Defense Police (DoD Police). These police fall under each directorate they work for within the United States Department of Defense, for example: DoD Army or DoD Navy Police. The Department of the Air Force Police operate under the Air Provost Marshal. The police officers' duties are similar to those of local civilian police officers. They enforce the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), federal and state laws, and the regulations of their particular installation.

Criminal investigations in the United States Armed Forces are carried out by separate agencies:

  • United States Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID)—Army
  • Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS)—Navy and Marine Corps
  • United States Marine Corps Criminal Investigation Division (minor crimes)
  • Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI)—Air Force
  • Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS)—Coast Guard

The Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) is a civilian agency that answers directly to the DOD as well as the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA).

The United States Constabulary was a gendarmerie force used to secure and patrol the American Zone of West Germany immediately after World War II.

Military police are trained to provide area security, usually by vehicle patrol, which is the mission of most military police stationed in Iraq. They are also trained in dealing with prisoners of war and other detainees, with special training in restraining, searching, and transporting prisoners to detainee camps. MPs can also be used as prison guards in detainee camps, although that responsibility usually falls on Internment/Resettlement Specialists, MOS 31E (Formerly Corrections Specialists).

Read more about this topic:  Military Police

Famous quotes related to united states:

    “I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.”
    —Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1954)

    “To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
    —Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)

    “The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.”
    —Ashley Montagu (b. 1905)

    “The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
    —Maya Angelou (b. 1928)

    “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”
    —Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)