Local Organization
There are some 289,000 police officers nationwide, about 97 percent of whom were affiliated with local police forces. Local forces include:
- forty-three prefectural (ken) police forces;
- Tokyo Metropolitan (to) police force, in Tokyo;
- two urban prefectural (fu) police forces, in Osaka and Kyoto; and
- one district (dō) police force, in Hokkaidō.
These forces have limited authority to initiate police actions. Their most important activities are regulated by the National Police Agency, which provides funds for equipment, salaries, riot control, escort, and natural disaster duties, and for internal security and multiple jurisdiction cases. National police statutes and regulations establish the strength and rank allocations of all local personnel and the locations of local police stations. Prefectural police finance and control the patrol officer on the beat, traffic control, criminal investigations, and other daily operations.
Read more about this topic: Law Enforcement In Japan
Famous quotes containing the words local and/or organization:
“While it may not heighten our sympathy, wit widens our horizons by its flashes, revealing remote hidden affiliations and drawing laughter from far afield; humor, in contrast, strikes up fellow feeling, and though it does not leap so much across time and space, enriches our insight into the universal in familiar things, lending it a local habitation and a name.”
—Marie Collins Swabey. Comic Laughter, ch. 5, Yale University Press (1961)
“The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.”
—Henry George (1839–1897)