Origins of police in modern state

• Main Author: Gaćinović Radoslav
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Criminal Investigation and Police Studies, Belgrade 2015-01-01
• Series: NBP: Nauka, bezbednost, policija
• Online Access: https://scindeks-clanci.ceon.rs/data/pdf/0354-8872/2015/0354-88721501067G.pdf
• ISSN: 0354-8872; 2620-0406

History shows that police are one of the oldest services in human society or state. As elementary form of social control, police are older than the state itself. From the point of view of etymology, the word 'police' (English - police, German - polizei, French - police) comes from the Greek word polis, politeia, which means city administration, the state, the constitution. This means that from the very term 'polis', which meant city-state, the word 'politeia' was derived, which presented the entire state activity, legislation, judiciary and administration. This term was used by the Romans, who used the term 'politeia'. For Aristotle the term 'politeia' represents an ideal form of state order. Therefore, politics and policy have originated from the term 'politeia'. The term 'police' has had many meanings throughout history, primarily because the role and organization of the police within social reality were changing. In France, Germany and some other countries in the 14th century, the term 'police' meant the entire state activity and/or, in a narrower sense the particularly ordered state system. In the European countries the term 'police' came to be more widely used in the 18th century, while it meant the entire internal administration in the absolutist monarchies with the developed state organization. Even in the 20th century the term 'police' was not uniformly and sufficiently precisely defined. Most often it means the branch of state authority which takes care of maintaining of public order, personal and property security, then the activities of that authority and the personnel in their service, as well as the building where this authority is situated. Police are, therefore, the complex professional system which is organized to maintain public order and order in a society and which is vested with legal powers and required means, including the means of coercion. Contemporary definitions of police so far can be classified in the following manner: normativist or funcionalist, which start from the function of police resulting from the norm which prescribes what the police should do and what they represent; coercivist (from English coercion), in which the criterion of coercion replaced the criterion of function. According to these conceptions the means used by the police, i.e. their legal possibility to use force, are more important than historically changing aims of policing.