MILITARY POLICE

 

Military police organizations include the Army Military Police Corps (MPC), Marine Corps Military Police (MCMP), Air Force Security Forces (AFSF), and Navy Master-at-Arms (MA) and Shore Patrol (SP). All have wide responsibilities, some identical to those of civilian agency counterparts and others unique to the missions of particular armed forces branches. Further, each branch also maintains a dedicated law enforcement unit, specializing in criminal investigations, apart from its primary policing unit. These structural separations are unlike the lines that delineate civilian detective divisions from parent police agencies. The military investigative units are the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), Navy and Marine Corps’ Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), and the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI).

The Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS) is excluded from this discussion, since the Coast Guard is not generally considered one of the armed forces. Long a part of the Treasury Department, the Coast Guard was transferred to Homeland Security under the major federal reorganization following the September 11, 2001, attacks. It continues its general policing, border protection, and public safety/rescue functions.

Historical Overview

Military police date from at least the 1100s, when the German Hohenstaufen rulers placed provost (pronounced “provo”) marshals in charge of army units called Kreigs-Polizei (war police). The Holy Roman Empire, circa 1300, had provost guards under a provost marshal, and in the 1600s the French had similar prevosts. During the Revolution, the American Continental Army modeled its provost marshal, who oversaw a provost guard after the French Marechausse (mounted light dragoon company). From the end of the Revolutionary War until World War II, the Army disbanded its provost marshal units during peacetime only to reestablish them, in one form or another, during wartime.

Even the term “military police” was not in formal usage until the end of the nineteenth century, when it was coined by Brigadier General Arthur MacArthur, provost marshal of Manila, captured in the Spanish American War. During World War I, General John Pershing requested that the War Department reconstitute a military police force under the Office of the Provost Marshal General (OPMG). Shortly afterward, at the Army’s first military police school at Autun, France, those new military policemen received their formal training following the British MP model.

Despite their considerable service, the military police units were all decommissioned shortly after the war. Not until the eve of World War II (September 26, 1941) were provost marshals and their respective military police units given permanent status within the Army’s organizational structure, as distinct offices and a distinct corps. The reactivated Office of the Provost Marshal General continued until 1974, when the winding down of the Vietnam War, among other factors, led to its elimination.

As the Army continued to evolve, first the Provost Marshal General School and then its successor, the U.S. Army Military Police School (USAMPS), not surprisingly, relocated a number of times. From four different sites during WWII to the immediate postwar period at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, military police training was moved to Fort Gordon, Georgia, then Fort McClellan, Alabama, and finally Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. As with its civilian police academy counterparts, the USAMPS has expanded its training from eight to twelve weeks; that more diversified training now includes, among other aspects, intelligence gathering, anti-terrorism tactics, and computer crime.

In addition to their military police training, career military police personnel, especially commissioned officers, frequently attend such noted police training facilities as Northwestern University’s Traffic Institute and the FBI Training Academy at Quantico, Virginia. Notably, as the armed forces’ first general-service police, the MPC remains the dominant, perhaps archetypal model for other service-based units. Nearly all police from the other services at some time in their careers attend the USAMPS. Marine Corps military police, for example, have historically attended USAMPS for their recruit police training, although they train in separate companies. And Army military police train dog handlers, traffic managers, and accident investigators from all service branches at Lackland Air Force Base.

In the Army military policing is a military occupational specialty (MOS), which those joining the Army have long been able to designate at recruitment. Relying for so long on shore patrols, the Navy did not create a permanent police force until 1973. Only since 2000 has the Navy begun to recruit specifically for master-at-arms (MA) positions, rather than converting personnel from existing ratings. Masters-at-arms organize shore patrols, operate short-term brigs (jails), handle dogs, and conduct investigations of military protocol violations and minor criminal offenses. Immediately following its formal separation from the Army, and obviously taking the Army’s model, the Air Force in 1947 established the Air Force Security Police (designated the AFSF in 1997).

Correctional and Criminal Investigative Units

Military police, as corrections specialists, provide custodial services for both pretrial detention facilities and prisons or, in the case of the Navy, brigs. In 1875, as part of the overall reform movement in corrections, the United States built its first permanent military prison, the U.S. Military Prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In 1915, that facility became officially the United States Disciplinary Barracks (USDB). Only in 2002 did a new USDB replace that famous prison, known unofficially as ”the castle” for its imposing architecture.

The USDB is the only level-three military prison, housing male prisoners with sentences longer than five years from all the armed forces branches. The MPC provides the bulk of the unformed staff, but the other branches have their own detachment commanders and are there as medical, treatment, educational, and clerical staff. The USDB has the military’s death row, and any executions would be carried out by lethal injection, in keeping with Kansas statute.

The Army, Navy, and Marines each maintain at least one level-two facility, housing inmates sentenced to confinement for from six months to five years. The Air Force uses the Navy’s level-two consolidated brigs at Charleston, South Carolina, and Miramar, California, the latter housing level-three females from all branches. And inmates are assigned to level-two facilities based on geography and treatment needs, rather than branch of service. Level-one facilities, including those run by the Air Force, are scattered across the country and on bases abroad to house pretrial detainees and short-term inmates. The American Correctional Association has accredited the USDB and at least four level-two facilities.

Even more structurally separate are the military investigative units. In 1944, the Army created the CID as its centralized unit to investigate all felonies under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and other related federal offenses against Army interests or personnel worldwide. In 2003, the Army consolidated the MPC, including the USAMPS and the CID, under a single command, namely a reactivated OPMG.

Interestingly, the Navy established its criminal investigative unit before formalizing its police. As far back as 1882, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) handled both intelligence and criminal investigative caseloads. The first independent criminal investigative unit came in 1966 with the creation of the Naval Investigative Service (NIS), renamed in 1992 the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS).

The MCMP became a permanent unit within the Marine Corps in 1970. In 1999, the Marine Corps’ Criminal Investigative Division was transferred to the NCIS, since the Marine Corps is organizationally situated within the Department of the Navy. Marine Corps and Navy lawyers also serve jointly in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. The Air Force, only one year after creating the AFSP, established its investigative OSI.

Notably, these criminal investigative units within the various armed forces branches perform important law enforcement roles that are separate and distinct from the general-purpose policing services or combat roles undertaken by military police.

Conclusion

Military police are tasked with special combat responsibilities, including escort guard duty, prisoner of war supervision, and combat rearguard, or even frontline, action, to mention only a few. Combat duties, clearly more dangerous than even those experienced by civilian SWAT teams, and structurally separate investigative units may seem to exclude comparisons with civilian departments or agencies. However, military police units can indeed be compared with county sheriffs’ offices. In fact, the only duty undertaken by county sheriffs’ deputies not commonly performed by military police is the service of civil court writs. Both sheriffs and military police provide nonemergency/enforcement services, transport prisoners, serve as court bailiffs, and administer jails and, in the case of the military, prisons. It is ironic that the nation’s most militarized police organization—the MPC—is most closely aligned with the most nonmilitarized of civilian policing—sheriffs’ offices.

Next post:

Previous post: