Understood broadly as a deliberate undertaking to enforce common standards within a community and to protect it from internal predators, policing is much older than the creation of a specialized armed force devoted to such a task. The activity of policing preceded the creation of the police as a distinct body by thousands of years. The derivation of the word police from the Greek polis, meaning “city,” reflects the fact that protopolice were essentially creatures of the city, to the limited extent that they existed as a distinct body. Early policing had three basic features that have not wholly disappeared. ...(100 of 29314 words)