Word.ws English Dictionary

police work

police work noun: work performed by police; the investigation of criminal activities.

Noun

police work (uncountable)

  1. Work performed by police; the investigation of criminal activities.
    • The complement will consist of 290 persons, and these cruisers should prove valuable additions to our service, especially in the line of police-work—the peace time duty of most of our ships not assigned for manœuvres.1899, Carl Schurz, George Brinton McClellan Harvey, George William Curtis, Henry Loomis Nelson, Henry Mills Alden, John Bonner, John Foord, John Kendrick Bangs, Montgomery Schuyler, Norman Hapgood...
    • Many who are unfamiliar with real police work little realize the extent to which police science has developed.1927, National Probation Association (U.S.), Annual Report and Proceedings of the Annual Conference, Volume 21, page 243

Examples of police work in a sentence

  • All the ordinary developments in telecommunications can be applied to police work.1951, Anthony K. Martienssen, Crime and the Police, page 96:
  • White officers were more likely to select skilled or other protective service positions (such as fireman) as a preferred employment at the time they entered police work.1967, Albert J. Reiss, Donald J. Black, Studies in Crime and Law Enforcement in Major Metropolitan Areas: Patterns of Behavior in Police...
  • As a result, there exists little or no transparency in police work at the station house level.1999, James Vadackumchery, Indian Police and Equal Justice Under Law, page 160:
  • That's not a bad motto for police work overall, he thought.2012, Håkan Nesser, Münster's Case, An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery:

Forms of police work

alternative formpolicework

Origin of police work

From police + work.

Questions about police work

What does police work mean?
Police work means work performed by police; the investigation of criminal activities.
How do you use police work in a sentence?
All the ordinary developments in telecommunications can be applied to police work.
What part of speech is police work?
Police work is a noun.

Words near police work in the dictionary

  1. police village
  2. police villages
  3. police violence
  4. police wagon
  5. police wagons
  6. police work
  7. policeable
  8. policeboat
  9. policeboats
  10. policed
  11. policed one's brass

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: police work (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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