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United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement
United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federal law enforcement agency under the United States Department of Homeland Security. Its stated mission is to conduct criminal investigations, enforce immigration laws, preserve national security, and protect public safety. ICE was created as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 following the September 11 attacks.
Law enforcement in the United States operates primarily through governmental police agencies. There are 17,985 police agencies in the United States which include municipal police departments, county sheriff’s offices, state troopers, and federal law enforcement agencies. The law enforcement purposes of these agencies are the investigation of suspected criminal activity, referral of the results of investigations to state or federal prosecutors, and the temporary detention of suspected criminals pending judicial action.
Law enforcement in Canada is the responsibility of police services, special constabularies, and civil law enforcement agencies, which are operated by every level of government, some private and Crown corporations, and First Nations. With the exception of the Unité permanente anticorruption (Permanent Anti-corruption Unit) in Quebec and the Organized Crime Agency of British Columbia, there are no organizations dedicated exclusively to the investigation of criminal activity in Canada. Criminal investigations are conducted by jurisdictional police services, which maintain specialized criminal investigation units in addition to their mandate for emergency response and general community safety.
Law enforcement in Spain is carried out by numerous organizations, with different duties and jurisdictions. Police officers in Spain are permanent public servants, who uphold public safety and compliance of the law. Being a law enforcement officer in Spain is not only a job, but rather a legal condition ("agents from the authority"), as they are legally obligated to intervene in all situations they witness "in defense of the law and public safety" regardless of them being on or off duty.
In many countries, particularly those with a federal system of government, there may be several law enforcement agencies, police or police-like organizations, each serving different levels of government and enforcing different subsets of the applicable law.
Women began working as police officers in the United States as early as the 1890s. Women made up 12.6% of all U.S. sworn police officers in 2018. Employed largely as prison matrons in the 19th century, women took on more and increasingly diverse roles in the latter half of the 20th century.
National Park Service Law Enforcement Rangers are uniformed federal law enforcement officers with broad authority to enforce federal and state laws within the National Park Service (NPS) sites. The National Park Service commonly refers to law enforcement operations in the agency as Visitor and Resource Protection. In units of the National Park System, law enforcement rangers are the primary police agency.
The police in Canada's ranks differ according to the different police forces and depend on different laws at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels.