Principles of Policing

The Ingleside Police Department believes in the Nine Principles of Policing:

  1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
  2. The ability of the police to perform their task is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions, behavior, and on the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect.
  3. The police must secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public as well as the cooperation of the public in the task of observance of laws.
  4. To recognize always that the extent to which the cooperation of the public can be secured diminishes, proportionately, the necessity for the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
  5. To seek and to preserve public favor, not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws; by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing; by ready offering of sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
  6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advise and warning is found to insufficient to obtain public cooperation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order; and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
  7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the history tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen, in the interest of community welfare and existence.
  8. To recognize always the need for strict adherence to police executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary or avenging individuals or the state, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
  9. To recognize always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

Robert Peel (1829)