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POLICE (from Greek politeia and Latin politia) – nowadays, it is a uniformed and armed formation intended to protect the safety of people and property and to maintain public safety and order. It can be organised like a military model and have a specialised character. Military police forces performing civil security tasks operate in France (Gendarmerie nationale), Italy (Arma dei Carabinier) or Spain (Guardia Civil). They can also be of a specialised character, dealing with particular areas of → public safety or specific categories of threats (e.g., medical police, sanitary, mining, forestry, postal and other police, today such terms as inspection, guards, etc., are used). In the modern world p. appears around 1500 in France as a police. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the entire internal administration outside the judiciary, military and treasury were called the police (the police state). Based on the experience of the period of absolute monarchy, the theory of the so-called law and police state, or police science, developed. It distinguished itself as an independent field of science in the 18th century and included within its scope a wide range of issues of administering the state, including the economic and financial sphere. The term “police” then had a broader understanding – in principle, it was synonymous with the concept of “state administration”. It was not until the first half of the 19th century that views on security were subjected to scientific and critical reflection and related to practice. In 1829, Sir Richard Maine, the creator of the metropolitan police in London, formulated the basic principles of the police actions: the goal of an effective police is to prevent crime, then detect and punish perpetrators of crime. As the citizens became independent from the state in the period of liberalism, the area of the concept of “police” became narrower, boiling down to the prevention of all dangers resulting from human coexistence and to limiting the citizen’s freedom of action in view of the good of the state. In the liberal state the police activity was preventive, so-called negative. The old, broader activity in the field of promoting the interests of the society – the so-called welfare police (wohlfartpolizei) – with the use of coercion went to the background. Moreover, as part of the emerging rule of law, every police action ceased to be free, it had to have a special statutory authorization. After the institutional concept of p. was formulated in the 19th century, the narrower material conception of p. gradually developed as an institution for combating threats. This narrowing was the result of the emerging liberal constitutional and legal state in which all state power is subordinated to the binding force of law. The statutes regulated a variety of administrative competences, fighting against threats was left to the p., which limited its power in the state. The result of this understanding of the scope of action of the p. was the Prussian Police Administration Act of 1931, which stipulated that it was obliged to carry out necessary measures within the established scope (under existing laws) in order to prevent both general and individual threats that violate security or public order. In the 20th century, due to the formation of totalitarian systems: fascist and communist, the activities of police services adopted an ideological character. Its functions were limited to protecting the hegemonic position of the ruling political party in the state and society [ A. Misiuk ].
