Philadelphia Police Department

The Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) is the police agency responsible for law enforcement and investigations within the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The PPD is the country's oldest municipal police agency, fourth largest police force and sixth largest non-federal law enforcement agency. Since records were first kept in 1828, at least 270 PPD officers have died in the line of duty.

Present day

The PPD employs over 6600 officers plus over 800 civilian personnel, and patrols an area of 369.4 km² (142.6 mi²) with a population of almost 1.5 million. The department is subdivided into 22 patrol districts, and like many other large municipal police forces, it incorporates many special units such as a K-9 squad, SWAT, community relations unit, and harbor patrol. The highest-ranking officer is Commissioner Richard Ross.

Organization

The head of the PPD is the commissioner, who is appointed by the mayor. The current commissioner is Richard Ross (2016 – Present). Under the commissioner are two three-star deputy commissioners. The First Deputy Commissioner heads Field Operations. The Deputy Commissioner and Chief Administrative Officer heads Organizational Services, Strategy, and Innovation.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia (/ˌfɪləˈdɛlfiə/) is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the fifth-most-populous in the United States, with an estimated population in 2014 of 1,560,297. In the Northeastern United States, at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill River, Philadelphia is the economic and cultural anchor of the Delaware Valley, a metropolitan area home to 7.2 million people and the eighth-largest combined statistical area in the United States.

In 1682, William Penn founded the city to serve as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony. Philadelphia played an instrumental role in the American Revolution as a meeting place for the Founding Fathers of the United States, who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution in 1787. Philadelphia was one of the nation's capitals in the Revolutionary War, and served as temporary U.S. capital while Washington, D.C., was under construction. In the 19th century, Philadelphia became a major industrial center and railroad hub that grew from an influx of European immigrants. It became a prime destination for African-Americans in the Great Migration and surpassed two million occupants by 1950.

Police

A police force is a constituted body of persons empowered by the state to enforce the law, protect property, and limit civil disorder. Their powers include the legitimized use of force. The term is most commonly associated with police services of a sovereign state that are authorized to exercise the police power of that state within a defined legal or territorial area of responsibility. Police forces are often defined as being separate from military or other organizations involved in the defense of the state against foreign aggressors; however, gendarmerie are military units charged with civil policing.

Law enforcement, however, constitutes only part of policing activity. Policing has included an array of activities in different situations, but the predominant ones are concerned with the preservation of order. In some societies, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, these developed within the context of maintaining the class system and the protection of private property. Many police forces suffer from police corruption to a greater or lesser degree. The police force is usually a public sector service, meaning they are paid through taxes.