In some countries, including the United States, security police are those persons, employed by or for a governmental agency, who provide police and security services to those agencies' properties.
Security police protect their agency's facilities, properties, personnel, users, visitors and operations from harm and may enforce certain laws and administrative regulations. Most security police have at least some arrest authority. The law enforcement powers of security police vary widely, in some cases limited to those of private persons yet in others amounting to full police powers equivalent to state, provincial, or local law enforcement.
As distinct from general law enforcement, the primary focus of security police is on the protection of specific properties and persons. This causes some overlap with functions normally performed by security guards. However, security police are distinguished from guards by greater authority, often higher levels of training, and correspondingly higher expectations of performance in the protection of life and property.
In other countries, 'security police' is the name given to the secret security and intelligence services charged with protecting the State at the highest level, including responsibilities such as personal protection of the head of state, counter-espionage, and anti-terrorism.
Read more about Security Police: Types of Security Police and Similar Organizations, Legal Authority of Security Police
Famous quotes containing the words security and/or police:
“There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy.... Be militant each in your own way.... I incite this meeting to rebellion.”
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“It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all men ... that alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.”
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