National Police Commissary

Commissaire de police is a rank in the French National Police. It should not be confused with the French appointment of "armed forces commissary" (commissaire des armées) which is an administrative military position.

Every commune with a population of more than 30,000-50,000 has a commissaire in charge of its detachment of the National Police, and larger communes have more than one (the Prefecture of Police of Paris has well over one hundred). A commissaire has both an administrative role and an investigative role.

Most officers join directly at the rank of commissaire. All are university graduates, usually in law, and have completed a further training course. It is also possible for junior officers to be promoted to the rank (something which was virtually impossible until relatively recently). A commissaire may be promoted to commissaire divisionnaire (a rank which existed in the Paris Police and the Mobile Brigades from the early 20th century), and thence to the higher ranks of the service.

The police station which serves as the commissaire's headquarters and the area for which they are responsible is a commissariat, a term which can also refer to the body of commissaires as a whole.

Commissaire is sometimes translated into English as commissioner, commissar, or commissary, none of which is accurate, and is approximately equivalent in rank to a British superintendent, although the commissaire also has judicial powers which police officers in English-speaking countries do not have.

commissaire

commissaire divisionnaire

contrôleur général

inspecteur général

directeur des services actifs

The commissaires originated in Paris as the 48 commissaires enquêteurs-examinateurs of the Grand Châtelet.

Long before 1667, they had served as all-purpose agents of the Châtelet in the various quarters of Paris. But by choice and economic compulsion, they had increasingly forsaken their role of watchdogs of public security and had become somewhat discredited fee-grabbers, mainly concerned with such matters as imposing seals on the property of the deceased, taking legal inventories, serving summonses, and imposing a wide variety of fines on which they collected a lucrative percentage.

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Wikipedia