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Joplin Police Department

law enforcement agency

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionFeb 27, 2025
Entity authorityQ6276177 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Joplin Police Department (JPD) is the principal law enforcement agency responsible for serving the city of Joplin in the U.S. state of Missouri.The Joplin Police Department currently employs 112 Police Officers. The department maintains a fleet of Dodge Chargers and Chevy Tahoes. The Joplin Police Department is the largest law enforcement agency in Jasper County, Missouri.

Department structure and history

The Joplin Police Department was created in 1873, and is responsible for providing law enforcement services to a major population center in Southwest Missouri encompassing approximately 50,000 city residents and 200,000 daily visitors through its patrol, investigations, administration, special enforcement, and support services bureaus which report to the Chief of Police, and previously to the Police Marshal. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, 21 officers have been killed in the line of duty in the department's history.

Officers are issued Glock pistols as their primary sidearm, in recent years JPD has upgraded to the 9mm Glock due to improved ballistics and the FBI going to 9mm.

Editorial summary

“Joplin Police Department” enters the record as law enforcement agency. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Joplin, Police and Department can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewMost valuable as an event-and-institution map that identifies actors, dates and record creators for deeper historical inquiry. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1873—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1873-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Joplin, Police and Department.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Joplin Police Department” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Joplin, Police and Department provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6276177. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1873.

Critical limits

Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Joplin Police Department”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Joplin Police Department primary sources, Joplin Police Department archive and Joplin research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Joplin Police Department”?
  2. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
  3. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Joplin Police Department” 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.