Inspector
police rank and administrative position
Inspector, also police inspector or inspector of police, is a police rank. The rank or position varies in seniority depending on the organization that uses it.
Australia
The rank of Inspector is present in all Australian police forces except for the Northern Territory. Where it exists, it is generally the next senior rank from Senior Sergeant, and is the lowest commissioned rank. Uniformed officers of this rank wear epaulettes with three pips, matching a Captain in the army. In addition to the general rank of inspector, some police forces use other ranks such as detective inspector and district inspector.
Austria
In Austria a similar scheme was used as in Germany. At some point the police inspector was completely removed from the list of service ranks. The current police service has an inspectors service track with Inspektor being the entry level – it is followed by Revierinspektor (precinct inspector), Gruppeninspektor (group inspector), Bezirksinspektor (district inspector), Abteilungsinspektor (section inspector), Kontrollinspektor (control inspector) and Chefinspektor (chief inspector).
Canada
In most Canadian police services the rank of inspector is the first officer/commissioned officer rank, above that of staff sergeant.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Inspector” as police rank and administrative position. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as police rank and administrative position. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
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 Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q511138. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. 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 “Inspector” 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.