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:
“... most Southerners of my parents’ era were raised to feel that it wasn’t respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn’t elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)
“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)