Legal Authority of Security Police
All security police derive their authority from two sources:
- the laws of their nation, territory and/or municipality
- the property rights of their employing or contracting agency or activity, which may be public or private or a mixture of both
These powers might include the power to detain, arrest, investigate criminal offenses, carry weapons, employ force, and/or take other actions to protect life and property beyond that of the ordinary citizen. One key distinction is between "sworn" (or bound by oath or affirmation to uphold the laws even at personal risk), and "non-sworn" or "civilian" who are ordinary employees with normal obligations to an employer.
Some security police are full-fledged peace officers with the same powers as regular police. Others have enhanced powers which are limited by law to the properties they protect, or a specified radius or distance. In some cases these powers are expanded by a Memorandum of Understanding or other legal document where other policing agencies delegate additional powers to enforce local law.
Some security police have the more limited powers of security guards in compliance with the laws of their jurisdiction.
These distinctions are of particular importance to security police and their employers.
Read more about this topic: Security Police
Famous quotes containing the words legal authority, legal, authority, security and/or police:
“No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“The churches ... have lost much of their authority over youth because they have refused to re-examine their religious sanctions and their dogmatic preaching in the light of modern physiology, psychology and sociology.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“... 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)
“Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)