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Concept
Traffic police
Summary
Traffic police (also known as traffic officers, traffic enforcement units, traffic cops, traffic monitors, or traffic enforcers) are police officers, units, and agencies who enforce traffic laws and manage traffic. Traffic police include police who patrol highways, direct traffic, and address traffic infractions. They may be a separate agency from a main police agency, a unit or division within a police agency, or a type of assignment issued to officers; they can also be part of a transportation authority or highway authority.
It has been noted that:
traffic police, who are regarded as peripheral to most police forces, participate in both authoritative intervention and symbolic justice. Perhaps alone of all the assignments, traffic police are full-service police. They are different from the rest, however, because their work is limited to a particular venue—namely, public thoroughfares—and to particular people—namely, those who operate motor vehicles. But in terms of work, traffic police are detectives as well as patrol officers.
In 1998 Stephen Chance and Stephen Dale proposed traffic policing as a model to deal with paperwork.
Traffic police have existed in some form for nearly three centuries. Possibly the first traffic police force was established in London, England in 1722, when the Lord Mayor of London, in response to an increase in traffic during the 18th century, appointed three men to position themselves on London Bridge and ensure traffic kept to the left side of the road and did not stop in traffic, with the aim of ensuring traffic could continue to flow unabated.
One of the oldest and most basic forms of traffic policing is directing traffic. This is conducted by a traffic officer (usually only one) who stands in the middle of an intersection, using hand signals and occasionally also a whistle, a handheld traffic sign (usually a stop sign), or a handheld light stick to manage the flow of vehicles and pedestrians.
Official source
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