Constabulary may have several definitions:
The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was the police force in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 2001. It was founded on 1 June 1922 as a successor to the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) following the partition of Ireland. At its peak the force had around 8,500 officers, with a further 4,500 who were members of the RUC Reserve.
A paramilitary is a military that is not part of a country's official or legitimate armed forces. Paramilitary units carry out duties that a country's military or police forces are unable or unwilling to handle. Other organizations may be considered paramilitaries by structure alone, despite being unarmed or lacking a combat role.
The Royal Irish Constabulary was the police force in Ireland from 1822 until 1922, when all of the country was part of the United Kingdom. A separate civic police force, the unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), patrolled the capital and parts of County Wicklow, while the cities of Derry and Belfast, originally with their own police forces, later had special divisions within the RIC. For most of its history, the ethnic and religious makeup of the RIC broadly matched that of the Irish population, although Anglo-Irish Protestants were overrepresented among its senior officers.
A highway patrol is a police unit, detail, or law enforcement agency created primarily for the purpose of overseeing and enforcing traffic safety compliance on roads and highways within a jurisdiction. They are also referred to in many countries as traffic police, although in other countries this term is more commonly used to refer to foot officers on point duty who control traffic at junctions.
A gendarmerie is a military force with law enforcement duties among the civilian population. The term gendarme is derived from the medieval French expression gens d'armes, which translates to "men-at-arms", or "rural police". In France and some Francophone nations, the gendarmerie is a branch of the armed forces that is responsible for internal security in parts of the territory, with additional duties as military police for the armed forces. It was introduced to several other Western European countries during the Napoleonic conquests. In the mid-twentieth century, a number of former French mandates and colonial possessions adopted a gendarmerie after independence. A similar concept exists in Eastern Europe in the form of Internal Troops, which are present in many countries of the former Soviet Union and its former allied countries.
The Ulster Special Constabulary was a quasi-military reserve special constable police force in what would later become Northern Ireland. It was set up in October 1920, shortly before the partition of Ireland. The USC was an armed corps, organised partially on military lines and called out in times of emergency, such as war or insurgency. It performed this role most notably in the early 1920s during the Irish War of Independence and the 1956-1962 IRA Border Campaign.
Chief Constable is the rank used by the chief police officer of every territorial police force in the United Kingdom except for the City of London Police and the Metropolitan Police, as well as the chief officers of the three 'special' national police forces, the British Transport Police, Ministry of Defence Police, and Civil Nuclear Constabulary. The title is also held by the chief officers of the principal Crown Dependency police forces and the Sovereign Base Areas Police in Cyprus. The title was also held, ex officio, by the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers under the Police Reform Act 2002. It was also the title of the chief officer of the Royal Parks Constabulary until this agency was disbanded in 2004.
The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) is the provincial police service for the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Auxiliary police, also called volunteer police, reserve police, assistant police, civil guards, or special police, are usually the part-time reserves of a regular police force. They may be unpaid volunteers or paid members of the police service with which they are affiliated.
Auxiliaries are support personnel that assist the military or police but are organised differently from regular forces. Auxiliary may be military volunteers undertaking support functions or performing certain duties such as garrison troops, usually on a part-time basis. Unlike a military reserve force, an auxiliary force does not necessarily have the same degree of training or ranking structure as regular soldiers, and it may or may not be integrated into a fighting force. Some auxiliaries, however, are militias composed of former active duty military personnel and actually have better training and combat experience than their regular counterparts.
Civilian checkpoints or security checkpoints are distinguishable from border or frontier checkpoints in that they are erected and enforced within contiguous areas under military or paramilitary control. Civilian checkpoints have been employed within conflict-ridden areas all over the world to monitor and control the movement of people and materials in order to prevent violence. They have also been used by police during peacetime to help counter terrorism.
A territorial police force is a police service that is responsible for an area defined by sub-national boundaries, distinguished from other police services which deal with the entire country or a type of crime. In countries organized as federations, police responsible for individual sub-national jurisdictions are typically called state or provincial police.
In many countries, particularly those with a federal system of government, there may be several law enforcement agencies, police or police-like organizations, each serving different levels of government and enforcing different subsets of the applicable law.
A field force in British and Indian Army military parlance is a combined arms land force operating under actual or assumed combat circumstances, usually for the length of a specific military campaign. It is used by other nations, but can have a different meaning.
The Hunt Report, or the Report of the Advisory Committee on Police in Northern Ireland, was produced by a committee headed by Baron Hunt in 1969. An investigation was performed into the perceived bias in policing in Northern Ireland against Catholics and other unprofessional practices. The Hunt Report was published on 10 October 1969 and proposed removing the military function from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the disbandment of the Ulster Special Constabulary, and their replacement of their military function to a new locally-recruited part time force, which became the Ulster Defense Regiment (UDR). Most of the main proposals of the Hunt Report were implemented, and the B-Specials were disbanded in March 1970. The reaction from some in the Unionist community was aggressive. Constable Victor Arbuckle was shot and killed on the day after the publishing of the Hunt Report when the RUC attempted to disperse a crowd of Unionists that had gathered near the Catholic area of Unity Flats. Constable Arbuckle was the first RUC man killed in what became known as The Troubles. The killing of Constable Arbuckle was allegedly carried out by members of the Ulster loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force. Critics would later state that the UDR displayed problems of bias and a difficulty with maintaining a balance of Catholic/Protestant membership, similar to its forerunners.
The police in Canada's ranks differ according to the different police forces and depend on different laws at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels.