text: Palmerston's overall policy was to safeguard British interests, maintain peace, keep the balance of power, and retain the status quo in Europe. He had no grievance against Russia and while he privately sympathised with the Polish cause, in his role as foreign minister he rejected Polish demands. With serious trouble simultaneously taking place in Belgium and Italy, and lesser issues in Greece and Portugal, he sought to de-escalate European tensions rather than aggravate them, favouring a policy of universal non-interventionism. He therefore focused chiefly on achieving a peaceful settlement of the crisis in Belgium.


title: Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

text: William I of the Netherlands appealed to the great powers that had placed him on the throne after the Napoleonic Wars to maintain his rights. The London Conference of 1830 was called to address this question. The British solution involved the independence of Belgium, which Palmerston believed would greatly contribute to the security of Britain, but any solution was not straightforward. On the one hand, the northern powers were anxious to defend William I; on the other, many Belgian revolutionaries, like Charles de Brouckère and Charles Rogier, supported the reunion of the Belgian provinces to France, whereas Britain favoured Dutch, not French influence, on an independent state.


text: The British policy which emerged was a close alliance with France, but one subject to the balance of power on the Continent, and in particular the preservation of Belgian independence. If the northern powers supported William I by force, they would encounter the resistance of France and Britain united in arms. If France sought to annex Belgium, it would forfeit the British alliance and find herself opposed by the whole of Europe. In the end the British policy prevailed. Although the continent had been close to war, peace was maintained on London's terms and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, the widower of a British princess, was placed upon the throne of Belgium. Fishman says that the London Conference was "an extraordinarily successful conference" because it "provided the institutional framework through which the leading powers of the time safeguarded the peace of Europe."


text: Thereafter, despite a Dutch invasion and French counter-invasion in 1831, France and Britain framed and signed a treaty settlement between Belgium and Holland, inducing the three Northern powers to accede to it as well; while in Palmerston's second period of office, as his authority grew, he was able to finally settle relations between Belgium and Holland with a treaty in 1838-9 - now asserting his (and British) independence by leaning rather more towards Holland and the Northern Powers, and against the Belgium/French axis.


text: In 1833 and 1834 the youthful Queens Isabella II of Spain and Maria II of Portugal were the representatives and the hope of the constitutional parties of their countries. Their positions were under some pressure from their absolutist kinsmen, Dom Miguel of Portugal and Don Carlos of Spain, who were the closest males in the lines of succession. Palmerston conceived and executed the plan of a quadruple alliance of the constitutional states of the West to serve as a counterpoise to the northern alliance. A treaty for the pacification of the Peninsula was signed in London on 22 April 1834 and, although the struggle was somewhat prolonged in Spain, it accomplished its objective.


text: France had been a reluctant party to the treaty, and never executed its role in it with much zeal. Louis Philippe was accused of secretly favouring the Carlists – the supporters of Don Carlos – and he rejected direct interference in Spain. It is probable that the hesitation of the French court on this question was one of the causes of the enduring personal hostility Palmerston showed towards the French King thereafter, though that sentiment may well have arisen earlier. Although Palmerston wrote in June 1834 that Paris was "the pivot of my foreign policy", the differences between the two countries grew into a constant but sterile rivalry that brought benefit to neither.


text: Palmerston was greatly interested by the diplomatic questions of Eastern Europe. During the Greek War of Independence he had energetically supported the Greek cause and backed the Treaty of Constantinople that gave Greece its independence. However, from 1830 the defence of the Ottoman Empire became one of the cardinal objects of his policy. He believed in the regeneration of Turkey, as he wrote to Bulwer (Lord Dalling): ""All that we hear about the decay of the Turkish Empire, and its being a dead body or a sapless trunk, and so forth, is pure unadulterated nonsense.""


text: His two great aims were to prevent Russia establishing itself on the Bosporus and to prevent France doing likewise on the Nile. He regarded the maintenance of the authority of the Sublime Porte as the chief barrier against both these developments.


text: Palmerston had long maintained a suspicious and hostile attitude towards Russia, whose autocratic government offended his liberal principles and whose ever-growing size challenged the strength of the British Empire. He was angered by the 1833 Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi, a mutual assistance pact between Russia and the Ottomans, but was annoyed and hostile towards David Urquhart, the creator of the Vixen affair, running the Russian blockade of Circassia in the mid-1830s.


text: For his part, David Urquhart considered Palmerston a "mercenary of Russia" and founded the "Free Press" magazine in London, where he constantly promoted these views. The permanent author of this magazine was Karl Marx, who stated "from the time of Peter the Great until the Crimean war, there was a secret agreement between the London and St. Petersburg offices, and that Palmerston was a corrupt tool the Tsar policy"


text: Despite his popular reputation he was hesitant in 1831 about aiding the Sultan of Turkey, who was under threat from Muhammad Ali, the pasha of Egypt. Later, after Russian successes, in 1833 and 1835 he made proposals to afford material aid, which were overruled by the cabinet. Palmerston held that "if we can procure for it ten years of peace under the joint protection of the five Powers, and if those years are profitably employed in reorganizing the internal system of the empire, there is no reason whatever why it should not become again a respectable Power" and challenged the metaphor that an old country, such as Turkey should be in such disrepair as would be warranted by the comparison: "Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by the abuse of metaphors, and by mistaking general resemblance or imaginary similarity for real identity." However, when the power of Muhammad Ali appeared to threaten the existence of the Ottoman dynasty, particularly given the death of Sultan Mahmud II on 1 July 1839, he succeeded in bringing the great powers together to sign a collective note on 27 July pledging them to maintain the independence and integrity of the Turkish Empire in order to preserve the security and peace of Europe. However, by 1840 Muhammad Ali had occupied Syria and won the Battle of Nezib against the Turkish forces. Lord Ponsonby, the British ambassador at Constantinople, vehemently urged the British government to intervene. Having closer ties to the pasha than most, France refused to be a party to coercive measures against him despite having signed the note in the previous year.


text: Palmerston, irritated at France's Egyptian policy, signed the London Convention of 15 July 1840 in London with Austria, Russia, and Prussia – without the knowledge of the French government. This measure was taken with great hesitation, and strong opposition on the part of several members of the cabinet. Palmerston forced the measure through in part by declaring in a letter to the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, that he would resign from the ministry if his policy were not adopted.


text: The London Convention granted Muhammad Ali hereditary rule in Egypt in return for withdrawal from Syria and Lebanon, but was rejected by the pasha. The European powers intervened with force, and the bombardment of Beirut, the fall of Acre, and the total collapse of Muhammad Ali's power followed in rapid succession. Palmerston's policy was triumphant, and the author of it had won a reputation as one of the most powerful statesmen of the age.


text: In September 1838, Palmerston appointed a British consul in Jerusalem, without the conventional consultation of the Board of Trade, and gave instruction to assist with the construction of an Anglican church in the city, under the prompting influences of Lord Shaftesbury, a prominent Christian Zionist.


text: China restricted outside trade under the Canton System to only one port and refused all official diplomatic relations except to tributary countries. In 1833–35 as London ended the East India Company's monopoly on trade with China, both Tory and Whig governments sought to maintain peace and good trade relations. However Lord Napier wanted to provoke a revolution in China that would open trade. The Foreign Office, led by Palmerston, stood opposed and sought peace. The Chinese government refused to change, and interdicted the British smugglers bringing in opium from India, which was banned in China. Britain responded with military force in the First Opium War, 1839–42, which ended in a decisive British victory. Under the Treaty of Nanjing, China paid an indemnity and opened five treaty ports to world trade. In those ports there would be extraterritorial rights for British citizens. Palmerston thus achieved his main goals of diplomatic equality and opening China to trade. However his angry critics focused on the immorality of the opium trade.


text: An entirely opposite British viewpoint was promoted by humanitarians and reformers such as the Chartists and religious nonconformists led by young William Ewart Gladstone. They argued that Palmerston was only interested in the huge profits it would bring Britain, and was totally oblivious to the horrible moral evils of opium which the Chinese government was valiantly trying to stamp out.


text: Meanwhile, he manipulated information and public opinion to enhance his control of his department, including controlling communications within the office and to other officials. He leaked secrets to the press, published selected documents, and released letters to give himself more control and more publicity, all the while stirring up British nationalism. He feuded with "The Times", edited by Thomas Barnes, which did not play along with his propaganda ploys.


text: In 1839, Palmerston married his mistress of many years, the noted Whig hostess Emily Lamb, widow of Peter Leopold Louis Francis Nassau Clavering-Cowper, 5th Earl Cowper (1778–1837) and sister of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, prime minister (1834 and 1835–1841). They had no legitimate children, although at least one of Lord Cowper's putative children, Lady Emily Cowper, the wife of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, was widely believed to have been fathered by Palmerston. Palmerston resided at Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, his wife's inheritance. His London townhouse was Cambridge House on Piccadilly in Mayfair. He also owned Broadlands at Romsey in Hampshire.


text: "His attentions to Lady Palmerston, when they both of them were well stricken in years, were those of a perpetual courtship. The sentiment was reciprocal; and I have frequently seen them go out on a morning to plant some trees, almost believing that they would live to eat the fruit, or sit together under the shade.


text: Young Queen Victoria found it unseemly that people in their 50s could marry, but the Cowper-Palmerston marriage according to biographer Gillian Gill:


text: Within a few months Melbourne's administration came to an end (1841) and Palmerston remained out of office for five years. The crisis was past, but the change which took place by the substitution of François Guizot for Adolphe Thiers in France, and of Lord Aberdeen for Palmerston in Britain kept the peace. Palmerston believed that peace with France was not to be relied on, and indeed that war between the two countries was sooner or later inevitable. Aberdeen and Guizot inaugurated a different policy: by mutual confidence and friendly offices, they entirely succeeded in restoring the most cordial understanding between the two governments, and the irritation which Palmerston had inflamed gradually subsided. During the administration of Sir Robert Peel, Palmerston led a retired life, but he attacked with characteristic bitterness the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 with the United States. It resolved several Canadian boundary disputes with the United States, particularly the border between New Brunswick and the State of Maine and between Canada and the State of Minnesota from Lake Superior and the Lake of the Woods. Much as he criticised it, the treaty successfully closed the border questions with which Palmerston had long been concerned.


text: Palmerston's reputation as an interventionist and his unpopularity with the Queen were such that Lord John Russell's attempt in December 1845 to form a ministry failed because Lord Grey refused to join a government in which Palmerston would direct foreign affairs. A few months later, however, the Whigs came to power and returned Palmerston to the Foreign Office (July 1846). Russell replied to critics that Palmerston's policies had "a "tendency" to produce war" but that he had advanced British interests without a major conflict, if not entirely peaceably.


text: Palmerston's years as foreign secretary, 1846–1851, involve dealing with violent upheavals all over Europe – he has been dubbed "the gunpowder minister" by biographer David Brown.


text: The French government regarded the appointment of Palmerston as a certain sign of renewed hostilities. They availed themselves of a dispatch in which he had put forward the name of a Coburg prince as a candidate for the hand of the young queen of Spain as a justification for a departure from the engagements entered into between Guizot and Lord Aberdeen. However little the conduct of the French government in this transaction of the Spanish marriages can be vindicated, it is certain that it originated in the belief that in Palmerston France had a restless and subtle enemy. The efforts of the British minister to defeat the French marriages of the Spanish princesses, by an appeal to the Treaty of Utrecht and the other powers of Europe, were wholly unsuccessful; France won the game, though with no small loss of honourable reputation.


text: Historian David Brown rejects the traditional interpretation to the effect that Aberdeen had forged an entente cordiale with France in the early 1840s whereupon the belligerent Palmerston after 1846 destroyed that friendly relationship. Brown argues that as foreign secretary from 1846 to 1851 and subsequently as prime minister, Palmerston sought to maintain the balance of power in Europe, sometimes even aligning with France to do so.


text: As an Anglo-Irish absentee landlord, Palmerston evicted 2,000 of his Irish tenants for non-payment of rent during the Great Irish Famine that ravaged Ireland in the late 1840s. He financed the emigration of starving Irish tenants across the Atlantic to North America as did Petty-Fitzmaurice (Lord Lansdowne) to equal notoriety. Palmerston asserted that "... any great improvement in the social system of Ireland must be founded upon an extensive change in the present state of agrarian occupation [through] a long continued and systematic ejectment of Small holders and of Squatting Cottiers."


text: The revolutions of 1848 spread like a conflagration through Europe, and shook every throne on the Continent except those of Russian empire, Ottoman empire, Spain, and Belgium. Palmerston sympathised openly with the revolutionary party abroad. In particular, he was a strong advocate of national self-determination, and stood firmly on the side of constitutional liberties on the Continent. Despite this, he was bitterly opposed to Irish independence, and deeply hostile to the Young Ireland movement.


text: No state was regarded by him with more aversion than Austria. Yet, his opposition to Austria was chiefly based upon its occupation of northeastern Italy and its Italian policy. Palmerston maintained that the existence of Austria as a great power north of the Alps was an essential element in the system of Europe. Antipathies and sympathies had a large share in the political views of Palmerston, and his sympathies had ever been passionately awakened by the cause of Italian independence. He supported the Sicilians against the King of Naples, and even allowed arms to be sent them from the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich. Although he had endeavoured to restrain the King of Sardinia from his rash attack on the superior forces of Austria, he obtained for him a reduction of the penalty of defeat. Austria, weakened by the revolution, sent an envoy to London to request the mediation of Britain, based on a large cession of Italian territory. Palmerston rejected the terms he might have obtained for Piedmont. After a couple of years this wave of revolution was replaced by a wave of reaction.


text: In Hungary the 1848 war for independence from the Austrian Empire, ruled by the Habsburg dynasty, was defeated by the joint army of Austrian and Russian forces. Prince Schwarzenberg assumed the government of the empire with dictatorial power. In spite of what Palmerston termed his judicious bottle-holding, the movement he had encouraged and applauded, but to which he could give no material aid, was everywhere subdued. The British government, or at least Palmerston as its representative, was regarded with suspicion and resentment by every power in Europe, except the French republic. Even that was shortly afterwards to be alienated by Palmerston's attack on Greece. When Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian democrat and leader of its constitutionalists, landed in England in 1851 to wide applause, Palmerston proposed to receive him at Broadlands, a design which was only prevented by a peremptory vote of the cabinet.


text: This state of things was regarded with the utmost annoyance by the British court and by most of the British ministers. On many occasions, Palmerston had taken important steps without their knowledge, which they disapproved. Over the Foreign Office he asserted and exercised an arbitrary dominion, which the feeble efforts of the premier could not control. The Queen and the Prince Consort did not conceal their indignation at the fact that they were held responsible for Palmerston's actions by the other Courts of Europe.


text: When Disraeli attacked Palmerston's foreign policy, the foreign minister responded to a five-hour speech by Anstey with a five-hour speech of his own, the first of two great speeches in which he laid out a comprehensive defence of his foreign policy and of liberal interventionism more generally. Arguing for domestic political effect, Palmerston declaimed:


text: Russell and the Queen both hoped that the other would take the initiative and dismiss Palmerston; the Queen was dissuaded by her husband Prince Albert, who took the limits of constitutional power very seriously, and Russell by Palmerston's prestige with the people and his competence in an otherwise remarkably inept Cabinet.


text: In 1847 the home of Don Pacifico, a Gibraltarian merchant living in Athens, Greece, was attacked by an antisemitic mob, which included the sons of a Greek government minister. The Greek police did not intervene in the attack, despite being present. Because Don Pacifico was a British subject, the British government expressed concern. In January 1850, Palmerston took advantage of Don Pacifico's claims on the Greek government, and blockaded the port of Piraeus in the kingdom of Greece. As Greece was under the joint protection of three powers, Russia and France protested against its coercion by the British fleet.


text: After a memorable debate on 17 June, Palmerston's policy was condemned by a vote of the House of Lords. The House of Commons was moved by Roebuck to reverse the rebuke, which it did on 29 June by a majority of 46, after having heard from Palmerston on 25 June. This was the most eloquent and powerful speech he ever delivered, wherein he sought to vindicate not only his claims on the Greek government for Don Pacifico, but his entire administration of foreign affairs.


text: It was in this speech, which lasted for five hours, that Palmerston made the well known declaration that a British subject ought everywhere to be protected by the strong arm of the British government against injustice and wrong; comparing the reach of the British Empire to that of the Roman Empire, in which a Roman citizen could walk the earth unmolested by any foreign power. This was the famous "civis romanus sum" ("I am a citizen of Rome") speech. After this speech, Palmerston's popularity had never been greater.


text: Notwithstanding his parliamentary triumph in the Don Pacifico affair, many of his own colleagues and supporters criticised the spirit in which the foreign relations of the Crown were carried on. The Queen addressed a minute to the Prime Minister in which she recorded her dissatisfaction at the manner in which Palmerston evaded the obligation to submit his measures for the royal sanction as failing in sincerity to the Crown. This minute was communicated to Palmerston, who accepted its criticisms.


text: On 2 December 1851, Louis Napoleon – who had been elected President of France in 1848 – carried out a "coup d'état" by dissolving the National Assembly and arresting the leading Republicans. Palmerston privately congratulated Napoleon on his triumph, noting that Britain's constitution was rooted in history but that France had had five revolutions since 1789, with the French Constitution of 1848 being a "day-before-yesterday tomfoolery which the scatterbrain heads of Marrast and Tocqueville invented for the torment and perplexity of the French nation". However, the Cabinet decided that Britain must be neutral, and so Palmerston requested his officials to be diplomatic. Palmerston's widespread support among the press, educated public opinion, and ordinary Britons caused apprehension and distrust among other politicians and angered the Court. Prince Albert complained Palmerston had sent a dispatch without showing the Sovereign. Protesting innocence, Palmerston resigned. Palmerston was weakened because Parliament, where he had great support, was not in session. Palmerston continued to have wide approval among the newspapers, elite opinion, and the middle class voters. His popularity led to distrust among rivals and especially at the Royal Court. His fall demonstrates the lack of power of public opinion in a pre-democratic era. However, Palmerston kept his public support and the growing influence of public opinion steadily increased his political strength in the 1850s and 1860s.


text: After a brief period of Conservative minority government, the Earl of Aberdeen became Prime Minister (in office 19 December 1852 – 30 January 1855) in a coalition government of Whigs and Peelites (with Russell taking the role of Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons). It was regarded as impossible for them to form a government without Palmerston, so he was made Home Secretary (28 December 1852). Many people considered this a curious appointment because Palmerston's expertise was so obviously in foreign affairs. A story recounts that after a great wave of strikes swept Northern England, the Queen summoned Palmerston to discuss the situation. When she enquired after the latest news, Palmerston allegedly replied: "There is no definite news, Madam, but it seems certain that the Turks have crossed the Danube".


text: Palmerston passed the Factory Act 1853, which removed loopholes in previous Factory Acts and outlawed all labour by young persons between 6pm and 6am. He attempted to pass a Bill that confirmed the rights of workers to combine, but the House of Lords rejected it. He introduced the Truck Act which stopped the practice of employers paying workmen in goods instead of money, or forcing them to purchase goods from shops owned by the employers. In August 1853 Palmerston introduced the Smoke Abatement Act in order to combat the increasing smoke from coal fires, a problem greatly aggravated by the Industrial Revolution. He also oversaw the passage of the Vaccination Act 1853 into law, which was introduced as a private member's bill, and which Palmerston persuaded the government to support. The Act made vaccination of children compulsory for the first time. Palmerston outlawed the burying of the dead in churches. The right to bury the dead in churches was held by wealthy families whose ancestors had purchased the right in the past. Palmerston opposed this practice on public-health grounds and ensured that all bodies were buried in a churchyard or public cemetery.


text: Palmerston reduced the period in which prisoners could be held in solitary confinement from eighteen months to nine months. He also ended transportation to Tasmania for prisoners by passing the Penal Servitude Act 1853, which also reduced the maximum sentences for most offences. Palmerston passed the Reformatory Schools Act 1854 which gave the Home Secretary powers to send juvenile prisoners to a reformatory school instead of to prison. He was forced to accept an amendment which ensured that the prisoner had to have spent at least three months in jail first. When in October 1854 Palmerston visited Parkhurst gaol and conversed with three boy inmates, he was impressed by their behaviour and ordered that they be sent to a reformatory school. He found the ventilation in the cells unsatisfactory and ordered improvement.


text: Palmerston strongly opposed Lord John Russell's plans for giving the vote to sections of the urban working-classes. When the Cabinet agreed in December 1853 to introduce a bill during the next session of Parliament in the form which Russell wanted, Palmerston resigned. However, Aberdeen told him that no definite decision on reform had been taken and persuaded Palmerston to return to the Cabinet. The electoral Reform Bill did not pass Parliament that year.


text: Palmerston's exile from his traditional realm of the Foreign Office meant he did not have full control over British policy during the events precipitating the Crimean War of 1853-1856. One of his biographers, Jasper Ridley, argues that had he been in control of foreign policy at this time, war in the Crimea would have been avoided. Palmerston argued in Cabinet, after Russian troops concentrated on the Ottoman border in February 1853, that the Royal Navy should join the French fleet in the Dardanelles as a warning to Russia. He was overruled, however.


text: In May 1853 the Russians threatened to invade the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia unless the Ottoman Sultan acceded to their demands. Palmerston argued for immediate decisive action - that the Royal Navy should be sent to the Dardanelles to assist the Turkish navy and that Britain should inform Russia of London's intention to go to war if the Imperial Russian Army invaded the principalities. However, Aberdeen objected to all of Palmerston's proposals. After prolonged arguments, a reluctant Aberdeen agreed to send a fleet to the Dardanelles but objected to Palmerston's other proposals. The Russian Emperor, Nicholas I, was annoyed by Britain's actions but they did not deter him. When the British fleet arrived at the Dardanelles the weather was rough, so the fleet took refuge in the outer waters of the straits (June 1853).


text: The Russians saw this as a violation of the Straits Convention of 1841; they invaded the two principalities in July 1853. Palmerston interpreted this as the result of British weakness and thought that if the Russians had been told that if they invaded the principalities the British and French fleets would enter the Bosphorus or the Black Sea, they would have been deterred. In Cabinet, Palmerston argued for a vigorous prosecution of the war against Russia by Britain, but Aberdeen objected, as he wanted peace. British public opinion supported the Turks, and with Aberdeen becoming steadily unpopular, Lord Dudley Stuart in February 1854 noted, "Wherever I go, I have heard but one opinion on the subject, and that one opinion has been pronounced in a single word, or in a single name – Palmerston."


text: On 28 March 1854 Britain and France declared war on Russia for refusing to withdraw from the principalities. The war progressed slowly, with no Anglo-French gains in the Baltic and slow coalition gains in Crimea at the long Siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855). Dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war grew amongst the public in Britain and in other countries, aggravated by reports of fiascos and failures, especially the mismanagement of the heroic Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava (25 October 1854). The health and living-conditions of the British soldiers became notorious and the press, with correspondents in the field, made the most of the situation. Tories demanded an accounting of all soldiers, cavalry and sailors sent to the Crimea and accurate figures as to the number of casualties. When Parliament passed a bill to investigate by a vote of 305 to 148, Aberdeen said he had lost a vote of no confidence and resigned as prime minister on 30 January 1855.


text: Queen Victoria deeply distrusted Palmerston and first asked Lord Derby to accept the premiership. Derby offered Palmerston the office of Secretary of State for War, which he accepted under the condition that Clarendon remain as Foreign Secretary. Clarendon refused, and so Palmerston rejected Derby's offer; Derby subsequently gave up trying to form a government. The Queen sent for Lansdowne but (aged 74) he was too old to accept: so she asked Russell; but none of his former colleagues except Palmerston wanted to serve under him. Having exhausted the possible alternatives, the Queen invited Palmerston to Buckingham Palace on 4 February 1855 to form a government.


text: Aged 70 years, 109 days, Palmerston became the oldest person in British political history to be appointed Prime Minister for the first time. As of 2022 no Prime Minister entering 10 Downing Street for the first time since Palmerston has surpassed his record.


text: Palmerston took a hard line on the war; he wanted to expand the fighting, especially in the Baltic where St. Petersburg could be threatened by superior British naval power. His goal was to permanently reduce the Russian threat to Europe. Sweden and Prussia were willing to join, and Russia stood alone. However, France, which had sent far more soldiers to the war than Britain, and had suffered far more casualties, wanted the war to end, as did Austria. In March 1855 the old Tsar died and was succeeded by his son, Alexander II, who wished to make peace. However, Palmerston found the peace terms too soft on Russia and so persuaded Napoleon III of France to break off the peace negotiations until Sevastopol could be captured, putting the allies in a stronger negotiating position. In September Sevastopol finally surrendered and the allies had full control of the Black Sea theatre. Russia came to terms. On 27 February 1856 an armistice was signed and after a month's negotiations an agreement was signed at the Congress of Paris. Palmerston's demand for a demilitarised Black Sea was secured, although his wish for the Crimea to be returned to the Ottomans was not. The peace treaty was signed on 30 March 1856. In April 1856 Palmerston was appointed to the Order of the Garter by Victoria.


text: In October 1856 the Chinese seized the pirate ship "Arrow", and in the process, according to the local British official Harry Parkes, insulted the British flag. When the Chinese Commissioner Ye Mingchen refused to apologise, the British shelled his compound. The commissioner retaliated with a proclamation that called on the people of Canton to "unite in exterminating these troublesome English villains" and offered a $100 bounty for the head of any Englishman. The British factories outside the city were also burned to the ground by incensed locals. Palmerston supported Parkes while in Parliament the British policy was strongly attacked on moral grounds by Richard Cobden and William Gladstone. Playing the patriotism card, Palmerston said that Cobden demonstrated "an anti-English feeling, an abnegation of all those ties which bind men to their country and to their fellow countrymen, which I should hardly have expected from the lips of any member of this House. Everything that was English was wrong, and everything that was hostile to England was right." He went on to say that if a motion of censure was carried it would signal that the House had voted to "abandon a large community of British subjects at the extreme end of the globe to a set of barbarians – a set of kidnapping, murdering, poisoning barbarians." The censure motion was carried by a majority of sixteen and the election of 1857 followed. Palmerston's stance proved popular among a large section of the workers, the growing middle classes and the country's commercial and financial interests. With the expanded franchise, his party swept on a wave of popular feeling to a majority of 83, the largest since 1835. Cobden and John Bright lost their seats.


text: In China the Second Opium War (1856–1860) was another humiliating defeat for a Qing dynasty, already reeling as a result of the domestic Taiping Rebellion.


text: After the election, Palmerston passed the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, which for the first time made it possible for courts to grant a divorce and removed divorce from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts. The opponents in Parliament, who included Gladstone, were the first in British history to try to kill a bill by filibuster. Nonetheless, Palmerston was determined to get the bill through, which he did. In June news came to Britain of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Palmerston sent Sir Colin Campbell and reinforcements to India. Palmerston also agreed to transfer the authority of the East India Company to the Crown. This was enacted in the Government of India Act 1858. After the Italian republican Felice Orsini tried to assassinate the French emperor with a bomb made in Britain, the French were outraged (see Orsini affair). Palmerston introduced a Conspiracy to Murder bill, which made it a felony to plot in Britain to murder someone abroad. At first reading, the Conservatives voted for it but at second reading they voted against it. Palmerston lost by nineteen votes. Therefore, in February 1858 he was forced to resign.


text: The Conservatives lacked a majority, and Russell introduced a resolution in March 1859 arguing for widening the franchise, which the Conservatives opposed but which was carried. Parliament was dissolved and a general election ensued, which the Whigs won. Palmerston rejected an offer from Disraeli to become Conservative leader, but he attended the meeting of 6 June 1859 in Willis's Rooms at St James Street, where the Liberal Party was formed. The Queen asked Lord Granville to form a government, but although Palmerston agreed to serve under him, Russell did not. Therefore, on 12 June the Queen asked Palmerston to become prime minister. Russell and Gladstone agreed to serve under him.


text: Historians usually regard Palmerston, starting in 1859, as the first Liberal prime minister. In his last premiership Palmerston oversaw the passage of important legislation. The Offences against the Person Act 1861 codified and reformed the law, and was part of a wider process of consolidating criminal law. The Companies Act 1862 was the basis of modern company law.


text: Foreign policy continued to be his main strength; he thought that he could shape if not control all of European diplomacy, especially by using France as a vital ally and trade partner. However, historians often characterise his method as bluffing more than decisive action.


text: Some people called Palmerston a womaniser; "The Times" named him Lord Cupid (on account of his youthful looks), and he was cited, at the age of 79, as co-respondent in an 1863 divorce case, although it emerged that the case was nothing more than an attempted blackmail.


text: Although Palmerston and William Gladstone treated each other as gentlemen, they disagreed fundamentally over Church appointments, foreign affairs, defence and reform; Palmerston's greatest problem during his last premiership was how to handle his Chancellor of the Exchequer. The MP Sir William Gregory was told by a member of the Cabinet that "at the beginning of each session and after each holiday, Mr Gladstone used to come in charged to the muzzle with all sorts of schemes of all sorts of reforms which were absolutely necessary in his opinion to be immediately undertaken. Palmerston used to look fixedly at the paper before him, saying nothing until there was a lull in Gladstone's outpouring. He then rapped the table and said cheerfully: 'Now, my Lords and gentlemen, let us go to business'." Palmerston told Lord Shaftesbury: "Gladstone will soon have it all his own way and whenever he gets my place we shall have strange doings". He told another friend that he thought Gladstone would wreck the Liberal Party and end up in a madhouse.


text: When in May 1864 the MP Edward Baines introduced a Reform Bill in the Commons, Palmerston ordered Gladstone to not commit himself and the government to any particular scheme. Instead Gladstone said in his speech in the Commons that he did not see why any man should not have the vote unless he was mentally incapacitated, but added that this would not come about unless the working class showed an interest in reform. Palmerston believed that this was incitement to the working class to begin agitating for reform and told Gladstone: "What every Man and Woman too have a Right to, is to be well governed and under just Laws, and they who propose a change ought to shew that the present organization does not accomplish those objects".


text: French intervention in Italy had created an invasion scare and Palmerston established a Royal Commission on the Defence of the United Kingdom which reported in 1860. It recommended a huge programme of fortifications to protect the Royal Navy Dockyards and ports, which Palmerston vigorously supported. Objecting to the enormous expense, Gladstone repeatedly threatened to resign as Chancellor when the proposals were accepted. Palmerston said that he had received so many resignation letters from Gladstone that he feared that they would set fire to the chimney.


text: During the advent and occurrence of the American Civil War, the British Ambassador to the United States was Palmerston's close friend and ally Richard Lyons, 2nd Baron Lyons. Palmerston had first appointed Richard Lyons to the Foreign Service in 1839, and was a close friend of his father, Edmund Lyons, 1st Baron Lyons, with whom he had vehemently advocated increased aggression in the Crimean War. Palmerston and Lyons both had similar sociopolitical sympathies: both advocated monarchy and foreign interventionism. Throughout the American Civil War, Palmerston and Richard Lyons maintained an extensive confidential correspondence. Their actions were responsible for the peaceful resolution of the Trent Affair. When Lyons resigned from the position of American Ambassador, Palmerston attempted to persuade him to return, but Lyons declined the offer.


text: Palmerston's sympathies in the American Civil War (1861–65) were with the secessionist Confederate States of America. Although a professed opponent of the slave trade and slavery, he held a lifelong hostility towards the United States, and believed a dissolution of the Union would enhance British power. Additionally, the Confederacy "would afford a valuable and extensive market for British manufactures".


text: Britain issued a at the beginning of the Civil War on 13 May 1861. The Confederacy was recognised as a belligerent but it was too premature to recognise it as a sovereign state. The United States Secretary of State, William Seward, threatened to treat as hostile any country which recognised the Confederacy. Britain depended more on American corn than Confederate cotton, and a war with the U.S. would not be in Britain's economic interest. Palmerston ordered reinforcements sent to the Province of Canada because he was convinced the North would make peace with the South and then invade Canada. He was very pleased with the Confederate victory at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, but 15 months later he felt: "...the American War... has manifestly ceased to have any attainable object as far as the Northerns are concerned, except to get rid of some more thousand troublesome Irish and Germans. It must be owned, however, that the Anglo-Saxon race on both sides have shown courage and endurance highly honourable to their stock."


text: The "Trent" Affair in November 1861 produced public outrage in Britain and a diplomatic crisis. A U.S. Navy warship stopped the British steamer "Trent" and seized two Confederate envoys "en route" to Europe. Palmerston called the action "a declared and gross insult", demanded the release of the two diplomats and ordered 3,000 troops to Canada. In a letter to Queen Victoria on 5 December 1861 he said that if his demands were not met: "Great Britain is in a better state than at any former time to inflict a severe blow upon and to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten." In another letter to his foreign secretary, he predicted war between Britain and the Union:


text: "It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the rabid hatred of England which animates the exiled Irishmen who direct almost all the Northern newspapers, will so excite the masses as to make it impossible for Lincoln and Seward to grant our demands; and we must therefore look forward to war as the probable result."


text: In fact, Irishmen did not control any major newspapers in the North, and the U.S. decided to release the prisoners rather than risk war. Palmerston was convinced the presence of troops in Canada persuaded the U.S. to acquiesce.


text: After President Abraham Lincoln's announcement in September 1862 that he would issue an Emancipation Proclamation in ninety days, the cabinet debated intervention as a humanitarian move to stop a likely race war. At the same time however there was a cabinet crisis in France over the overthrow of the Greek king and the growing Eastern Question with regard to Russia. The British Government had to determine whether the situation in North America or the containment of Russia was more urgent. The decision was to give priority to threats closer to home and to decline France's suggestion of a joint intervention in America; the threatened race war over slavery never happened. Palmerston rejected all further efforts of the Confederacy to gain British recognition.


text: The raiding ship CSS "Alabama", built in the British port of Birkenhead, was another difficulty for Palmerston. On 29 July 1862, a law officer's report he had commissioned advised him to detain "Alabama", as its construction was a breach of Britain's neutrality. Palmerston ordered "Alabama" detained on 31 July, but it had already put to sea before the order reached Birkenhead. In her subsequent cruise, "Alabama" captured or destroyed many Union merchant ships, as did other raiders fitted out in Britain. The U.S. accused Britain of complicity in the construction of the raiders. This was the basis of the postwar "Alabama" claims for damages against Britain, which Palmerston refused to pay. After his death, Gladstone acknowledged the U.S. claim and agreed to arbitration, paying out $15,500,000 in damages.


text: In the autumn of 1862, Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, opened a cabinet debate on whether Britain should intervene. Gladstone had a favourable image of the Confederacy. He emphasised the humanitarian intervention to stop the staggering death toll, and failure of the Union to achieve decisive military results, but Prime Minister Palmerston had other concerns at the same time, including a crisis connected with the overthrow of the Greek king, which put the Eastern Question in play. The Cabinet decided that the American situation was less urgent than the need to contain Russian expansion, so it rejected Gladstone's suggestions.


text: The Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck wanted to annex the Danish duchy of Schleswig and the neighboring German duchy of Holstein, whose Duke was the King of Denmark, chiefly for its port of Kiel, and had an alliance with Austria for this purpose. In a speech to the Commons on 23 July 1863, Palmerston said the British government, like those of France and Russia, wished that "the independence, the integrity, and the rights of Denmark may be maintained. We are convinced—I am convinced at least—that if any violent attempt were made to overthrow those rights and interfere with that independence, those who made the attempt would find in the result that it would not be Denmark alone with which they would have to contend". Palmerston's stance derived from the traditional belief that France was the greater threat to Britain and was much stronger than Austria and Prussia. In any case, France and Britain were at odds over Poland, and Paris refused to cooperate with London on the Danish crisis. Public opinion in Britain was strongly pro-Danish, thanks especially to the Danish princess who married the Prince of Wales. However Queen Victoria was intensely pro-German and strongly urged against threatening war. Palmerston himself favoured Denmark but he also had long been pacifistic in this matter and did not want Britain to become militarily involved.


text: For five months Bismarck did nothing. However, in November the Danish government instituted a new constitution whereby Schleswig was bound closer to Denmark. By the year's end, the Prussian and Austrian armies had occupied Holstein and were massing on the River Eider, the border with Schleswig. On 1 February 1864 the Prussian-Austrian armies invaded Schleswig, and ten days afterwards the Danish government requested British help to resist this. Russell urged Palmerston to send a fleet to Copenhagen and persuade Napoleon III that he should mobilise his French soldiers on the borders of Prussia.


text: Palmerston replied that the fleet could not do much to assist the Danes in Copenhagen and that nothing should be done to persuade Napoleon to cross the Rhine. Britain had a small army and it had no powerful ally to help. Bismarck remarked that the Royal Navy lacked wheels—it was powerless on land where the war would be fought. In April Austria's navy was on its way to attack Copenhagen. Palmerston told the Austrian ambassador that if his fleet entered the Baltic to attack Denmark the result would be war with Britain. The ambassador replied that the Austrian navy would not enter the Baltic and it did not do so.


text: Palmerston accepted Russell's suggestion that the war should be settled at a conference, but at the ensuing London Conference of 1864 in May and June the Danes refused to accept their loss of Schleswig-Holstein. The armistice ended on 26 June and Prussian-Austrian troops quickly invaded more of Denmark. On 25 June the Cabinet was against going to war to save Denmark, and Russell's suggestion to send the Royal Navy to defend Copenhagen was only carried by Palmerston's vote. Palmerston, however, said the fleet could not be sent in view of the deep division in the Cabinet.


text: On 27 June Palmerston gave his statement to the Commons and said Britain would not go to war with the German powers unless the existence of Denmark as an independent power was at stake or Denmark's capital was threatened. The Conservatives replied that Palmerston had betrayed the Danes and a vote of censure in the House of Lords was carried by nine votes. In the debate in the Commons the Conservative MP General Peel said: "It is come to this, that the words of the Prime Minister of England, uttered in the Parliament of England, are to be regarded as mere idle menaces to be laughed at and despised by foreign powers." Palmerston replied in the last night of the debate: "I say that England stands as high as she ever did and those who say she had fallen in the estimation of the world are not the men to whom the honour and dignity of England should be confided".


text: The vote of censure was defeated by 313 votes to 295, with Palmerston's old enemies in the pacifist camp, Cobden and Bright, voting for him. The result of the vote was announced at 2:30 in the morning, and when Palmerston heard the news he ran up the stairs to the Ladies' Gallery and embraced his wife. Disraeli wrote: "What pluck to mount those dreadful stairs at three o'clock in the morning, and eighty years of age!"


text: I am sure every Englishman who has a heart in his breast and a feeling of justice in his mind, sympathizes with those unfortunate Danes (cheers), and wishes that this country could have been able to draw the sword successfully in their defence (continued cheers); but I am satisfied that those who reflect on the season of the year when that war broke out, on the means which this country could have applied for deciding in one sense that issue, I am satisfied that those who make these reflections will think that we acted wisely in not embarking in that dispute. (Cheers.) To have sent a fleet in midwinter to the Baltic every sailor would tell you was an impossibility, but if it could have gone it would have been attended by no effectual result. Ships sailing on the sea cannot stop armies on land, and to have attempted to stop the progress of an army by sending a fleet to the Baltic would have been attempting to do that which it was not possible to accomplish. (Hear, hear.) If England could have sent an army, and although we all know how admirable that army is on the peace establishment, we must acknowledge that we have no means of sending out a force at all equal to cope with the 300,000 or 400,000 men whom the 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 of Germany could have pitted against us, and that such an attempt would only have insured a disgraceful discomfiture—not to the army, indeed, but to the Government which sent out an inferior force and expected it to cope successfully with a force so vastly superior. (Cheers.) ... we did not think that the Danish cause would be considered as sufficiently British, and as sufficiently bearing on the interests and the security and the honour of England, as to make it justifiable to ask the country to make those exertions which such a war would render necessary.


text: Europe's leaders were unable to settle the matter by peaceful compromise. Palmerston's biographer William Baring Pemberton argued that his "failure to understand Bismarck lies at the root of his misunderstanding of the Schleswig-Holstein question, and it derived from an old man's inability to adapt himself to a changing world". Thus Britain was militarily unable to stop Bismarck's armies and misunderstood Bismarck's ambitions. Russian historian V. N. Vinogradov writes: "In place of the former insight came bias in judgments and stubbornness in defending outdated views. Palmerston continued to consider Prussia 'an instrument in the hands of Austria', its army weak and doomed to defeat, and its public to consist of romantically minded students and dreamy professors. And Otto von Bismarck quietly annexed the two Duchies to Prussia, and at the same time the County of Lauenburg".


text: Palmerston won another general election in July 1865, increasing his majority. The leadership of Palmerston was a great electoral asset to the Liberal Party. He then had to deal with the outbreak of Fenian violence in Ireland. Palmerston ordered the Viceroy of Ireland, Lord Wodehouse, to take measures against this, including a possible suspension of trial-by-jury and a monitoring of Americans travelling to Ireland. He believed that the Fenian agitation was caused by America. On 27 September 1865 he wrote to the Secretary for War:


text: The American assault on Ireland under the name of Fenianism may be now held to have failed, but the snake is only scotched and not killed. It is far from impossible that the American conspirators may try and obtain in our North American provinces compensation for their defeat in Ireland.


text: He advised that more armaments be sent to Canada and more troops be sent to Ireland. During these last few weeks of his life, Palmerston pondered on developments in foreign affairs. He began thinking of a new friendship with France as "a sort of preliminary defensive alliance" against the United States and looked forward to Prussia becoming more powerful as this would balance against the growing threat from Russia. In a letter to Russell he warned that Russia "will in due time become a power almost as great as the old Roman Empire ... Germany ought to be strong in order to resist Russian aggression."


text: Palmerston enjoyed robust health in old age, living at Romsey in his home Foxhills, built in about 1840. On 12 October 1865 he caught a chill, and instead of retiring immediately to bed he spent an hour and a half dawdling. He then had a violent fever but his condition stabilised for the next few days. However, on the night of 17 October his health worsened, and when his doctor asked him if he believed in regeneration of the world through Jesus Christ, Palmerston replied: "Oh, surely." His last words were, "That's Article 98; now go on to the next." (He was thinking about diplomatic treaties.) An apocryphal version of his last words is: "Die, my dear doctor? That is the last thing I shall do." He died at 10:45 am on Wednesday, 18 October 1865 two days before his eighty-first birthday. Although Palmerston wanted to be buried at Romsey Abbey, the Cabinet insisted that he should have a state funeral and be buried at Westminster Abbey, which he was, on 27 October 1865. He was the fifth person not of royalty to be granted a state funeral (after Robert Blake, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Nelson, and the Duke of Wellington).


text: Queen Victoria wrote after his death that though she regretted his passing, she had never liked or respected him: "Strange, and solemn to think of that strong, determined man, with so much worldly ambition – gone! He had often worried and distressed us, though as Pr. Minister he had behaved "very well"." Florence Nightingale reacted differently upon hearing of his death: "He will be a great loss to us. Tho' he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. No one else will be able to carry things thro' the Cabinet as he did. I shall lose a powerful protector...He was so much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice."


text: Having no male heir, his Irish viscountcy became extinct upon his death, but his property was inherited by his stepson William Cowper-Temple (later created the 1st Baron Mount Temple), whose inheritance included a estate in the north of County Sligo in the west of Ireland, on which his stepfather had commissioned the building of the incomplete Classiebawn Castle.


text: Palmerston has traditionally been viewed as "a Conservative at home and a Liberal abroad". He believed that the British constitution as secured by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the best which human hands had made, with a constitutional monarchy subject to the laws of the land but retaining some political power. He supported the rule of law and opposed further democratisation after the Reform Act 1832. He wished to see this liberal system of a mixed constitution in-between the two extremes of absolute monarchy and republican democracy replace the absolute monarchies on the Continent. More recently some historians have seen his domestic policies as prime minister as not merely liberal but genuinely progressive by the standards of his era.


text: It is in foreign affairs that Palmerston is chiefly remembered. Palmerston's principal aim in foreign policy was to advance British national interests. Palmerston is famous for his patriotism. Lord John Russell said that "his heart always beat for the honour of England". Palmerston believed it was in Britain's interests that liberal governments be established on the Continent. He also practised brinkmanship and bluff in that he was prepared to threaten war to achieve Britain's interests.


text: When in 1886 Lord Rosebery became foreign secretary in Gladstone's government, John Bright, a longstanding radical critic of Palmerston, asked Rosebery if he had read about Palmerston's policies as foreign secretary. Rosebery replied that he had. "Then", said Bright, "you know what to avoid. Do the exact opposite of what he did. His administration at the Foreign Office was one long crime."


text: In contrast the Marquess of Lorne, a son-in-law of Queen Victoria, said of Palmerston in 1866: "He loved his country and his country loved him. He lived for her honour, and she will cherish his memory."


text: In 1889 Gladstone recounted a story of when "a Frenchman, thinking to be highly complimentary, said to Palmerston: 'If I were not a Frenchman, I should wish to be an Englishman'; to which Pam coolly replied: 'If I were not an Englishman, I should wish to be an Englishman. When Winston Churchill campaigned for rearmament in the 1930s, he was compared to Palmerston in warning the nation to look to its defences. The policy of appeasement led General Jan Smuts to write in 1936 that "we are afraid of our shadows. I sometimes long for a ruffian like Palmerston or any man who would be more than a string of platitudes and apologies."


text: He was an avowed abolitionist whose attempts to abolish the slave trade was one of the most consistent elements of his foreign policy. His opposition to the slave trade created tensions with South American countries and the United States over his insistence that the Royal Navy had the right to search the vessels of any country if they suspected the vessels were being used in the Atlantic slave trade.


text: Palmerston is also remembered for his light-hearted approach to government. He is once said to have claimed of a particularly intractable problem relating to Schleswig-Holstein, that only three people had ever understood the problem: one was Prince Albert, who was dead; the second was a German professor, who had gone insane; and the third was himself, who had forgotten it.


text: "The Life of Lord Palmerston up to 1847" was written by Lord Dalling (Sir H. Lytton Bulwer), volumes I and II (1870), volume III edited and partly written by Evelyn Ashley (1874), after the author's death. Ashley completed the biography in two more volumes (1876). The whole work was reissued in a revised and slightly abridged form by Ashley in 2 volumes in 1879, with the title "The Life and Correspondence of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston"; the letters are judiciously curtailed, but unfortunately without indicating where the excisions occur; the appendices of the original work are omitted, but much fresh matter is added, and this edition is undoubtedly the standard biography.


text: Anthony Trollope published a very readable memoir of Palmerston, one of his political heroes, in 1882.


title: Black operation

text: A black operation or black op is a covert or clandestine operation by a government agency, a military unit or a paramilitary organization; it can include activities by private companies or groups. Key features of a black operation are that it is secret and it is not attributable to the organization carrying it out.


title: Black operation

text: A single such activity may be called a black bag operation; that term is primarily used for covert or clandestine surreptitious entries into structures to obtain information for human intelligence operations. Such operations are known to have been carried out by the FBI, CIA, KGB, Mossad, MI6, MI5, ASIS, COMANF, DGSE, AISE, CNI, MSS, R&AW, DGFI, SVR, FSB and the intelligence services of other nations.


title: Black operation

text: The main difference between a black operation and one that is merely secret is that a black operation involves a significant degree of deception, to conceal who is behind it or to make it appear that some other entity is responsible (e.g. false flag operations).


title: Black operation

text: "Black" may be used as a generic term for any government activity that is hidden or secret. For example, in the United States, some activities by military and intelligence agencies are funded by a classified "black budget", of which the details, and sometimes even the total, are hidden from the public and from most congressional oversight.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Law enforcement in the United States is one of three major components of the criminal justice system of the United States, along with courts and corrections. Although each component operates semi-independently, the three collectively form a chain leading from an investigation of suspected criminal activity to the administration of criminal punishment.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: There are more than 900,000 sworn law enforcement officers now serving in the United States, which is the highest figure ever; about 12 percent of those are women.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Law enforcement operates primarily through governmental police agencies. There are 17,985 police agencies in the United States which include municipal police departments, county sheriff's offices, state troopers, and federal law enforcement agencies. The law enforcement purposes of these agencies are the investigation of suspected criminal activity, referral of the results of investigations to state or federal prosecutors, and the temporary detention of suspected criminals pending judicial action. Law enforcement agencies, to varying degrees at different levels of government and in different agencies, are also commonly charged with the responsibilities of deterring criminal activity and preventing the successful commission of crimes in progress. Other duties may include the service and enforcement of warrants, writs, and other orders of the courts.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Law enforcement agencies are also involved in providing first response to emergencies and other threats to public safety; the protection of certain public facilities and infrastructure, such as private property; the maintenance of public order; the protection of public officials; and the operation of some detention facilities (usually at the local level).


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Policing in the United States is conducted by "around 18,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, all with their own rules". Every state has its own nomenclature for agencies, and their powers, responsibilities and funding vary from state to state. 2008 census data from the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) revealed that this constitutes:


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: At the federal level, there exists both federal police, who possess full federal authority as given to them under United States Code (U.S.C.), and federal law enforcement agencies, who are authorized to enforce various laws at the federal level. Both police and law enforcement agencies operate at the highest level and are endowed with police roles; each may maintain a small component of the other (for example, the FBI Police). The agencies have jurisdiction in all states, U.S. territories, and U.S. possessions for enforcement of federal law. Most federal agencies are limited by the U.S. Code to investigating only matters that are explicitly within the power of the federal government. However, federal investigative powers have become very broad in practice, especially since the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. There are also Federal LEAs, such as the US Park Rangers, that are granted state arrest authority off primary federal jurisdiction.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The Department of Justice (DOJ) is responsible for most law enforcement duties at the federal level. It includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the United States Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), and others.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is another branch with numerous federal law enforcement agencies reporting to it. U.S. Border Patrol (USBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), United States Secret Service (USSS), United States Coast Guard (USCG), and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are some of the agencies that report to DHS. The United States Coast Guard is assigned to the United States Department of Defense in the event of war.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: At a crime or disaster scene affecting large numbers of people, multiple jurisdictions, or broad geographic areas, many police agencies may be involved by mutual aid agreements. For example, the United States Federal Protective Service responded to the Hurricane Katrina natural disaster. The command in such situations remains a complex and flexible issue.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In accordance with the federal structure of the United States government, the national (federal) government is not authorized to execute general police powers by the Constitution of the United States of America. The power to have a police force is given to each of the United States' 50 federated states. The US Constitution gives the federal government the power to deal with foreign affairs and interstate affairs (affairs between the states). For police, this means that if a non-federal crime is committed in a U.S. state and the fugitive does not flee the state, the federal government has no jurisdiction. However, once the fugitive crosses a state line, he violates the federal law of interstate flight and is subject to federal jurisdiction, at which time federal law enforcement agencies may become involved.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Most states operate statewide law enforcement agencies that provide law enforcement duties, including investigations and state patrols. They may be called state police or highway patrol (state troopers), and are normally part of the state Department of Public Safety. In addition, the Attorney General's office of each state has its own state bureau of investigation, such as in California with the California Department of Justice. The Texas Ranger Division fulfills this role in Texas, although they were founded in the period before Texas became a state.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Various departments of state governments may have their own enforcement divisions, such as capitol police, campus police, state hospitals, departments of correction, water police, environmental (fish and game/wildlife) conservation officers, or game wardens (with full police powers and statewide jurisdiction). For example, in Colorado, the Department of Revenue has its own investigative branch.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Also known as parishes and boroughs, county law enforcement is provided by sheriffs' departments or offices, constables and county police.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: County police tend to exist only in metropolitan counties and have countywide jurisdiction. For places that have both county police and county sheriff, responsibilities are given to each: the county police are in charge of typical police duties such as patrol and investigations, whereas the sheriffs' department in this situation takes care of serving papers and providing security to the courts. County police tend to fall into three broad categories, full service, limited service, and restrictive service. Full service provides full police services to the entire county. Limited service provides to the unincorporated and special districts. Restricted service provide security to the county-owned parts of the county.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Sheriffs are police and have many different responsibilities. Sheriffs are elected officials where the head of police is appointed or hired in. Sheriffs are responsible for all three parts of the criminal justice system. They uphold the county jail, ensure safety within the courts, and have jurisdiction to enforce laws in the entire county. They have more responsibilities such as transporting prisoners, running crime labs, and collecting taxes.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In Texas, the sheriff's office is normally the agency responsible for handling mental health calls. If the situation is dangerous, a sheriff's deputy has the power to take a person to a hospital on a mental health commitment immediately. However, if the situation is not actively dangerous, a warrant must be sought. With the rise in mental health units across the state, the Texas CIT Association was formed.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The Commonwealth of Virginia does not have overlapping county and city jurisdictions, whereas in most other states, municipalities generally fall within (and share jurisdiction and many other governmental responsibilities with) one (or more) county(ies). In Virginia, governmental power flows down from the state (or in Virginia's case, commonwealth) directly to either a county or an independent city. Thus, policing in Virginia is more streamlined: the county sheriff's office/department or county police department does not overlap with an independent city police department. Unincorporated townships remain part of their parent county, but incorporated townships may have town police departments to augment their county law enforcement. Town police departments are often small and may deploy a combination of paid and unpaid, full and part-time law enforcement officers, including auxiliary officers who typically serve as part-time, unpaid volunteers. If present, independent city sheriff's offices usually follow the restrictive model shown above for sheriff's departments, with limited law enforcement authority including warrant service, jail bailiff, etc. Mutual assistance compacts may exist where neighboring law enforcement agencies will assist each other, however, in addition to state (commonwealth) law enforcement resources. Like most states, Virginia also has campus police officers. Under Virginia State Code 23.1-809 and 23.1-810, public and private colleges and universities can maintain their own armed police force and employ sworn campus police officers. These sworn officers have the same authority as local police and are required to complete police academy training mandated by the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services. Virginia campus police officers have jurisdiction on and immediately around the campus, but police departments may petition to the local circuit court for concurrent jurisdiction with the local police.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Municipal police range from one-officer agencies (sometimes still called the town marshals) to the 40,000 person-strong New York City Police Department, which has its own counterterrorism agency. Most municipal agencies take the form (Municipality Name) Police Department. Most municipalities have their own police departments.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Metropolitan departments, such as the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, have jurisdiction covering multiple communities and municipalities, often over a wide area, and typically share geographical boundaries within one or more cities or counties. Metropolitan departments have usually been formed by a merger between local agencies, typically several local police departments and often the local sheriff's department or office, in efforts to provide greater efficiency by centralizing command and resources and to resolve jurisdictional problems, often in communities experiencing rapid population growth and urban sprawl, or in neighboring communities too small to afford individual police departments. Some county sheriff's departments, such as the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, are contracted to provide full police services to local cities within their counties. Likewise, in Florida, the Duval County Road Patrol and the Jacksonville Police Department consolidated in 1968 to form the "Office of the Sheriff - Jacksonville Police," commonly known as the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, policing all of Duval County.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The Puerto Rico Police Department (PRPD) traces back to 1837, when Spanish governor Francisco Javier de Moreda y Prieto created La Guardia Civil de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Civil Guard) to protect the lives and property of Puerto Ricans who at the time were Spanish subjects, and provide police services to the entire island, even though many municipalities maintained their own police force. The United States invaded and took possession of Puerto Rico in July 1898 as a result of the Spanish–American War and has controlled the island as a US territory since then. The Insular Police of Puerto Rico was created on February 21, 1899, under the command of Colonel Frank Thacher (U.S. Marine officer during the Spanish–American War), with an authorized strength of 313 sworn officers. As of 2009, the PRPD had over 17,292 officers.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: There are other types of specialist law enforcement agency with varying jurisdictions. Most of these serve special-purpose districts and are known as special district police. In some states, they serve as little more than security police, but in states such as California, special district forces are composed of fully sworn police officers with statewide authority.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: These agencies can be transit police, school district police, campus police, airport police, harbor police, railroad police, park police or police detectives responsible for protecting government property, such as the former Los Angeles General Services Police. Some agencies, such as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department, have multi-state powers. There are also some private police agencies, such as the Parkchester Department of Public Safety and Co-op City Department of Public Safety.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Textbooks and scholars have identified three primary police agency functions. The following is cited from "The American System of Criminal Justice", by George F. Cole and Christopher E. Smith, 2004, 10th edition, Wadsworth/Thomson Learning:


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Given the broad mandates of police work and the limited resources they have, police administrators must develop policies to prioritize and focus their activities. Some of the more controversial policies restrict, or even forbid, high-speed vehicular pursuits. Researchers Falcone, Wells, & Weisheit describe a historical separation of police models between small towns and larger cities. The distinction has also been defined between rural and urban policing models, which tended to function differently with separate hierarchical systems supporting each.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Three styles of policing develop from a jurisdiction's socioeconomic characteristics, government organization, and choice of police administrators. According to a study in a book by James Q. Wilson ("Varieties of Police Behavior", 1968, 1978, Harvard University Press), there were three distinct types of policing developed in his study of eight communities. Each style emphasized different police functions and was linked to specific characteristics of the community the department served.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Wilson's study applies to police behavior for the entire department over time. At any given time, police officers may be acting in a watchman, service, or legalistic function by the nature of what they are doing at the time, their temperament, or their mood at the time. Individual officers may also be inclined to one style or another, regardless of the supervisor or citizen demands.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Community-oriented policing is a shift in policing practices in the U.S. that moved away from standardization and towards a more preventative model where police actively partner with the community it serves.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Policing in what would become the United States of America arose from the law enforcement systems in European countries, particularly the ancient English common law system. This relied heavily on citizen volunteers, as well as watch groups, constables, sheriffs, and a conscription system known as "posse comitatus" similar to the militia system.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: An early night watch formed in Boston in 1631, and in 1634 the first U.S. constable on record was Joshua Pratt, in the Plymouth Colony. Constables were tasked with surveying land, serving warrants, and enforcing punishments.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: A rattlewatch was formed in New Amsterdam, later to become New York City, in 1651. The New York rattlewatch "strolled the streets to discourage crime and search for lawbreakers" and also served as town criers. In 1658, they began drawing pay, making them the first municipally funded police organization. When the English captured New Amsterdam in 1664, they installed a constable whose duties included keeping the peace, suppressing excessive drinking, gambling, prostitution, and preventing disturbances during church services.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In the Southern colonies, formal slave patrols were created as early as 1704 in the Carolinas in order to prevent slave rebellions and enslaved people from escaping. By 1785 the Charleston Guard and Watch had "a distinct chain of command, uniforms, sole responsibility for policing, salary, authorized use of force, and a focus on preventing 'crime'."


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Modern policing began to emerge in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century, influenced by the British model of policing established in 1829. The first organized publicly-funded professional full-time police services were established in Boston in 1838, New York in 1844, and Philadelphia in 1854.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Slave patrols in the south were abolished upon the abolition of slavery in the 1860s. The legal tactics of the slave patrols are reflected in the vigilante tactics of the Ku Klux Klan.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In the late 19th and early 20th century, there were few specialized units in police departments. In 1905, the Pennsylvania State Police became the first state police agency established in the United States, as recommended by President Theodore Roosevelt's Anthracite Strike Commission and Governor Samuel Pennypacker.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The advent of the police car, two-way radio, and telephone in the early 20th century transformed policing into a reactive strategy that focused on responding to calls for service. In the 1920s, led by Berkeley, California police chief August Vollmer, police began to professionalize, adopt new technologies, and place emphasis on training. With this transformation, police command and control became more centralized. Orlando Winfield Wilson, a student of Vollmer, helped reduce corruption and introduce professionalism in Wichita, Kansas, and later in the Chicago Police Department. Strategies employed by O.W. Wilson included rotating officers from community to community to reduce their vulnerability to corruption, establishing a non-partisan police board to help govern the police force, a strict merit system for promotions within the department, and an aggressive, recruiting drive with higher police salaries to attract professionally qualified officers.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Despite such reforms, police agencies were led by highly autocratic leaders, and there remained a lack of respect between police and the community. During the professionalism era of policing, law enforcement agencies concentrated on dealing with felonies and other serious crime, rather than focusing on crime prevention. Following urban unrest in the 1960s, police placed more emphasis on community relations, and enacted reforms such as increased diversity in hiring. The Kansas City Preventive Patrol study in the 1970s found the reactive approach to policing to be ineffective. The cost of policing rapidly expanded during the 1960s. In 1951, American cities spent $82 per person on policing. Adjusting for inflation, police spending increased over 300% by 2016, to $286 per person.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In the 1990s, many law enforcement agencies began to adopt community policing strategies, and others adopted problem-oriented policing. In the 1990s, CompStat was developed by the New York Police Department as an information-based system for tracking and mapping crime patterns and trends, and holding police accountable for dealing with crime problems. CompStat, and other forms of information-led policing, have since been replicated in police departments across the United States.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Law enforcement officers are granted certain powers to enable them to carry out their duties. When there exists probable cause to believe that a person has committed a serious crime, a misdemeanor in their presence, or a select-few misdemeanors not in their presence, a law enforcement officer can handcuff and arrest a person, who will be held in a police station or jail pending a judicial bail determination or an arraignment.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In 2010, the FBI estimated that law enforcement agencies made 13,120,947 arrests (excluding traffic violations). Of those persons arrested, 74.5% were male and 69.4 percent of all persons arrested were white, 28.0 percent were black, and the remaining 2.6 percent were of other races.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: A law enforcement officer may briefly detain a person upon reasonable suspicion of involvement in a crime but short of probable cause to arrest. Merely lawfully detaining a person—in and of itself—does not deprive a person of their Fourth Amendment right against unlawful searches. Federal, state, and local laws, and individual law enforcement departmental policies govern when, where, how, and upon whom a law enforcement officer may perform a "pat down," "protective search," or "Terry frisk," based on several U.S. Supreme Court decisions (including "Terry v. Ohio" (1968), "Michigan v. Long" (1983), and "Maryland v. Buie" (1990)):


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In "Terry v. Ohio", the landmark decision introducing the term "Terry frisk", or "frisk", to the broader public (italics added):


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Our evaluation of the proper balance that has to be struck in this type of case leads us to conclude that there must be a narrowly drawn authority to permit a reasonable search for weapons for the protection of the police officer, "where he has reason to believe that he is dealing with an armed and dangerous individual", regardless of whether he has probable cause to arrest the individual for a crime. The officer need not be absolutely certain that the individual is armed; the issue is "whether a reasonably prudent man in the circumstances would be warranted in the belief that his safety or that of others was in danger".


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In most states, law enforcement officers operate under the same self-defense laws as the general public. Generally, when the first responder or a member of the public is at risk of serious bodily injury and/or death, lethal force is justified. Most law enforcement agencies establish a use of force continuum and list deadly force as a force of last resort. With this model, agencies try to control excessive uses of force. Nonetheless, some question the number of killings by law enforcement officers, including killings of people who are unarmed, raising questions about alleged widespread and ongoing excessive use of force. Other non-fatal incidents and arrests have raised similar concerns.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The racial distribution of victims of US police lethal force is not proportionate to the racial distribution of the US population. Whites account for the largest racial group of deaths, but are under-represented, accounting for 45% of police killings (and 60% of the population). Blacks are over-represented, accounting for 24% of police killings (and 13% of the population). Hispanics are proportionately represented, accounting for 17% of police killings (and 18% of the population). Others (including Asian, Native American, and others) are under-represented, accounting for 4% of police killings (and 8% of the population).


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The militarization of both rural and urban law enforcement has been attributed to the United States' involvement in wars during the 20th century, although some attribute the militarization to the more recent campaigns on drugs and terror. Historian Charles Beard argues that cultural change during the Great Depression encouraged the militarization of law enforcement, whereas Harwood argues that the creation of Special Response Teams and tactical units within law enforcement during the 1960s began such a trend.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In recent years, the use of military equipment and tactics for community policing and for public order policing has become more widespread under the 1033 program. The program prompted discussion among lawmakers in 2014 after unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. President Obama introduced restrictions in 2015 on the transfer of surplus military equipment to police. In 2017, the Trump administration announced it would reinstate the program.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The use of no-knock warrants has become widespread and controversial. Their use has led to misconduct, unlawful arrests, and deaths.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The U.S. Supreme Court first introduced the qualified immunity doctrine in 1967, originally with the rationale of protecting law enforcement officials from frivolous lawsuits and financial liability in cases where they acted in good faith in unclear legal situations. Starting around 2005, courts increasingly applied the doctrine to cases involving the use of excessive or deadly force by police, leading to widespread criticism that it, in the words of a 2020 Reuters report, "has become a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights".


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Rules on civil asset forfeiture allow law enforcement officers to seize anything which they can plausibly claim was the proceeds of a crime. The property-owner need not be convicted of that crime; if officers find drugs in a house, they can take cash from the house and possibly the house itself. Commentators have said these rules provide an incentive for law enforcement officers to focus on drug-related crimes rather than crimes against persons, such as rape and homicide. They also provide an incentive to arrest suspected drug-dealers inside their houses, which can be seized, and to raid stash houses after most of their drugs have been sold, when officers can seize the cash.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Over the past decades, police departments across the country have been affected by instances of misconduct and brutality. Some prominent examples include the following:


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Despite safeguards around recruitment, some police departments have at times relaxed hiring and staffing policies, sometimes in violation of the law, most often in the cases of local departments and federally funded drug task forces facing staffing shortages, attrition, and needs to quickly fill positions. This has included at times the fielding (and sometimes the arming) of uncertified officers (who may be working temporarily in what is supposed to be a provisional limited-duty status prior to certification) and the hiring of itinerant "gypsy cops", who may have histories of poor performance or misconduct in other departments.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The procedural use of strip searches and cavity searches by law enforcement has raised civil liberties concerns. The practice of taking an arrested person on a perp walk, often handcuffed, through a public place at some point after the arrest, creating an opportunity for the media to take photographs and video of the event, has also raised concerns.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The New York City Police Department came under scrutiny in 2012 for its use of a stop-and-frisk program.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Special commissions, such as the Knapp Commission in New York City during the 1970s, have been used to bring about changes in law enforcement agencies. Civilian review boards (permanent external oversight agencies) have also been used as a means for improving police accountability. Review boards tend to focus on individual complaints, rather than broader organizational issues that may result in long-term improvements.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act authorized the United States Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division to bring civil ("pattern or practice") suits against local law enforcement agencies, to reign in abuses and hold them accountable. As a result, numerous departments have entered into consent decrees or memoranda of understanding, requiring them to make organizational reforms. This approach shifts focus from individual officers to placing focus on police organizations.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: The Cost of Police Misconduct Act (H.R.8908) is a bill introduced to the House on 9 December 2020 by Rep. Don Beyer, proposed while incoming chair of the United States Congressional Joint Economic Committee, which seeks to create "a publicly accessible federal database that would track police misconduct allegations and settlements at both the state and federal levels".


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: There have been many initiatives for police reform in the United States, notably since the 1960s, under President Lyndon Johnson, and several more recent efforts. In the 21st century, reforms based on community dialogue, legal requirements and updating of police training are growing. Nonetheless, instances of misconduct and brutality have continued to occur. Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, a number of reforms were implemented.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: While police resentment and calls for abolition of the police have existed in the United States for over a century, police abolition became more popular in 2014 following the killing of Michael Brown and the Ferguson unrest, with national attention being drawn to issues surrounding policing. The roots of police abolition stem from (and is often linked to) the prison abolition movement.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Authors and activists such as Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who are best known for their prison abolition work, have integrated police abolition into their work when advocating against the carceral system of the United States.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In the summer of 2016, Chicago had a multitude of abolitionist actions and protests in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Paul O'Neal, among others. This included the occupation of an empty lot across from a Chicago Police Department property, naming it "Freedom Square", as an experiment of a world without police.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: In 2017, sociologist Alex S. Vitale authored "The End of Policing", calling for police abolition as opposed to reforms.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Police abolition spiked in popularity following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin. A super-majority of the Minneapolis City Council (9 of 12 council members) pledged in June 2020 to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Nearly all U.S. states and the federal government have by law adopted minimum-standard standardized training requirements for all officers with powers of arrest within the state. Many standards apply to in-service training as well as entry-level training, particularly in the use of firearms, with periodic re-certification required. These standards often comply with standards promoted by the US Department of Justice and typically require a thorough background check that potential police recruits must take.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Repeated interviews, written tests, medical examinations, physical fitness tests, comprehensive background investigations, fingerprinting, drug testing, a police oral board interview, a polygraph examination, and a consultation with a psychologist are common practices used to review the suitability of candidates. Recruiting in most departments is competitive, with more suitable and desirable candidates accepted over lesser ones, and failure to meet some minimum standards disqualifying a candidate entirely. Police oral boards are the most subjective part of the process and often disqualifies the biggest portion of qualified candidates. Departments maintain records of past applicants under review, and refer to them in the case of either reapplication or requests between other agencies.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Police academies exist in every state and also at the federal level. Policing in the United States is highly fragmented, and there are no national minimum standards for licensing police officers in the U.S. Researchers say police are given far more training on use of firearms than on de-escalating provocative situations. On average, US officers spend around 21 weeks training before they are qualified to go on patrol, which is far less than in most other developed countries.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Police use a wide range of vehicles in their duties. Police vehicles are used for patrol, responses, and pursuits, and generally carry much of an officer's equipment, including communication devices and tools. Police vehicles in the United States have traditionally been sedans produced by the Big Three (Ford, General Motors, Stellantis), though SUVs, crossovers, pickup trucks, station wagons, and a wide variety of other vehicles have seen use among police departments historically and presently, in both standard and specialized roles.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Police in the United States usually carry a handgun on duty. Many are required to be armed off-duty and often required to have a concealable off-duty handgun. Among the most common sidearms are models produced by Glock, Smith & Wesson, SIG Sauer, Beretta, and Heckler & Koch, usually in 9mm, .40 S&W, .357 SIG (US Secret Service and other Federal Law Enforcement agencies) or .45 ACP.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Until the late 1980s and early 1990s, most US police officers carried revolvers, typically in .38 Special or .357 Magnum calibers, as their primary duty weapons. At the time, Smith & Wesson, Colt, Ruger and some Taurus models were popular with police officers, most popular being the Smith & Wesson or Colt revolvers. Since then, most agencies have switched to semi-automatic pistols. Two key events influencing many US police forces to upgrade their primary duty weapons to types with greater stopping power and round capacity were the 1980 Norco shootout and the 1986 FBI Miami shootout.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Some police departments allow qualified officers to carry shotguns and/or semi-automatic rifles in their vehicles for additional firepower, typically to be used if a suspect is involved in an active shooter situation, or a hostage/barricade incident.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Police often carry an impact weapon—a baton, also known as a nightstick. The common nightstick and the side handle baton have been replaced in many locations by expandable batons such as the Monadnock Auto-Lock Expandable Baton or ASP baton. One advantage of the collapsible baton is that the wearer can comfortably sit in a patrol vehicle while still wearing the baton on their duty belt. The side handle nightstick usually has to be removed before entering the vehicle. Many departments also use less-lethal weapons such as mace, pepper spray, and beanbag shotgun rounds.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Another less lethal weapon that police officers often carry is an electroshock gun, also known as a Taser. The handheld electroshock weapon was designed to incapacitate a single person from a distance by using electric current to disrupt voluntary control of muscles. Someone struck by a Taser experiences stimulation of their sensory nerves and motor nerves, resulting in strong involuntary muscle contractions. Tasers do not rely only on pain compliance, except when used in Drive Stun mode, and are thus preferred by some law enforcement over non-Taser stun guns and other electronic control weapons.


title: Law enforcement in the United States

text: Most large police departments have elite special weapons and tactics (SWAT) units, police tactical units used to handle situations such as barricaded suspects, hostage situations, and high-risk warrant service that require greater force, specialized equipment, and special tactics. These units usually have submachine guns, automatic carbines or rifles, semiautomatic combat shotguns, sniper rifles, gas, smoke, and flashbang grenades, ballistic shields, and other specialized weapons and equipment at their disposal. Some departments are equipped with armored vehicles.