Auxiliary police
usually the part-time reserves of a regular police force
Auxiliary police, also called volunteer police, reserve police, assistant police, civil guards, or special police, are usually the part-time reserves of a regular police force. They may be unpaid volunteers or paid members of the police service with which they are affiliated; there is no consistent international definition.
Auxiliary police are primarily tasked with supporting and augmenting the police, but this may also extend to established emergency services such as the fire department (and in the case of fire police), emergency medical services, border guard, and coast guard. Duties commonly assigned to auxiliaries include community policing, neighborhood watch, traffic policing, civil defense, and riot control.
The police powers auxiliaries may exercise vary from agency to agency; some have no or limited authority, while others may be accorded full police powers. They may be armed or unarmed.
Australia
The Australian Federal Police can appoint special members who do not have full police powers. Special members are generally recruited locally to perform regulatory and administrative duties while others perform community policing duties in locations such as Norfolk Island, Christmas Island and Jervis Bay Territory.
The Western Australia Police has had auxiliary officers since 2009. The role of police auxiliary officers was inserted into the Police Act 1892 by the Police Amendment Act 2009.
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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 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q626632. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2009 and 1892.
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This entry incorporates text from “Auxiliary police” 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.