Securing the Public

Not being told something or being improperly trained is not your fault, but at the same time it can still be your problem. It is my hope that you would devote just a couple of minutes brushing up on police history, and at the same time recognize that modern policing, as we know it, is heavily influenced by security-oriented tasks. What do you think a residential vacation check is? It's a proactive physical security measure. I would argue that most police officers probably spend a healthy part of their tour, especially on midnight shift, functioning as security on patrol, but fail to recognize their actions because they forgot where they came from. What we recognize today as two separate entities, "security" and "police," were actually synonymous for hundreds of years. Through evolution they separated into two forms of protective service: one that provides specific benefits (security) and the other general (police). It would appear, from my perspective, that both are now on a course of convergence once again, mainly due to terrorism. But you might never have recognized this unless you first knew the history.