A police authority in the United Kingdom, were localised panels charged with securing efficient and effective policing of a police area served by a territorial police force or the area and/or activity policed by a special police force. Separate arrangements existed for England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and for any force not created under one of those countries' national Police Acts (or equivalent for Northern Ireland) which had a matching police authority created.
Police Authorities were dissolved on 22 November 2012, and were replaced with directly elected Police and Crime Commissioners.
Read more about Police Authority: Northern Ireland, Special Police Forces
Famous quotes containing the words police and/or authority:
“The duties which a police officer owes to the state are of a most exacting nature. No one is compelled to choose the profession of a police officer, but having chosen it, everyone is obliged to live up to the standard of its requirements. To join in that high enterprise means the surrender of much individual freedom.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to,—for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well,—is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)