Australian Police Medal
Australian medal for meritorious service
The Australian Police Medal (APM) is awarded for distinguished service by a member of an Australian police force.
The APM was introduced in 1986, and replaced the Imperial King’s Police Medal for Gallantry and King’s Police Medal for Distinguished Service.
Awards are made by the Governor-General, on the nomination of the responsible federal minister or respective state premier or territory chief minister. Recipients of the Australian Police Medal are entitled to use the post-nominal letters "APM".
Description
The APM is a circular, nickel-silver medal ensigned with the Crown of St Edward. The front of the medal displays the effigy of the Sovereign on a Federation Star, superimposed over a pattern of fluted rays.
The back of the medal is inscribed with the words ‘Australian Police Medal’ and ‘For Distinguished Service’. The inscriptions are encircled by a wreath of the national floral emblem, the golden wattle.
The 32 millimetre-wide ribbon features a central vertical stripe of dark blue flanked by two white stripes.
Eligibility
The total number of awards made each year must not exceed the following quota:
One medal for every 1000 members, or part of 1000 members plus one additional medal.
“Australian Police Medal” enters the record as australian medal for meritorious service. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Australian, Police and Medal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Australian Police Medal” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Australian, Police and Medal provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4824569. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986 and 1000.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Australian Police Medal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.