Special Police - United States

United States

In United States terminology, special police can mean:

  • Fire Police, members of specialized traffic control units responding with volunteer fire companies;
  • Auxiliary Police, members of volunteer, unpaid or paid, part-time civilian police, security officer units, interns;
  • Special Law Enforcement Officers - used in New Jersey to supplement full-time police officers;
  • Security police; or
  • Company police.

The term can also refer to limited police power granted in some jurisdictions to lifeguards, SPCA personnel, teachers, and other public sector employees which is incidental to their main responsibilities. Special Police Officers (or SPO's) can be employed to protect large campuses such as theme parks, hospital centers, and commerce centers.

Some states, such as Maryland, New York, and the District of Columbia, grant full State Police/peace officer authority to SPOs for use in whatever area they are employed to protect. They can make traffic stops in their jurisdiction if they have had accredited training. They are also permitted to conduct traffic control and investigations pertaining to the area protected by them, while a majority of SPOS are armed with a firearm, some states permit the age for an SPO to be 18, while still they can not carry a sidearm. Special police can make a criminal arrest and run blue strobe lights on their vehicle.

In the United States security officers are involved in law enforcement and have been given the power of police officers, but are operated under a private police agency also known as a security agency. Security officers are special police because they are officers of the law, but employed by private companies offering private police officers to uphold laws, protect, patrol, and guard property under a private party contract.

Read more about this topic:  Special Police

Famous quotes related to united states:

    An inquiry about the attitude towards the release of so-called political prisoners. I should be very sorry to see the United States holding anyone in confinement on account of any opinion that that person might hold. It is a fundamental tenet of our institutions that people have a right to believe what they want to believe and hold such opinions as they want to hold without having to answer to anyone for their private opinion.
    Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)

    Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.
    Angela Carter (1940–1992)

    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)

    ... while one-half of the people of the United States are robbed of their inherent right of personal representation in this freest country on the face of the globe, it is idle for us to expect that the men who thus rob women will not rob each other as individuals, corporations and Government.
    Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)

    I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.
    Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)