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Mark Shields (police officer)

British police officer

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 5, 2026
Entity authorityQ6769699 ↗
Source-derived summary

Mark Shields (born 1957) is a former British law enforcement officer and security consultant. After nearly three decades of service with the City of London, Essex and the Metropolitan Police Services, in 2005 he moved to Jamaica to take up a new position as Deputy Police Commissioner of the Jamaica Constabulary Force. In that capacity, he came to worldwide attention as he led the investigation into the death of Pakistan's cricket coach Bob Woolmer in the run-up to the 2007 Cricket World Cup finals. The Guardian credits him as "the British officer who changed policing in Jamaica".

Early career

Shields began his law enforcement career in 1976 at the age of 17. He served as the head of the City of London Police's special branch from 1987 to 1990. He also spent time as a member of the National Criminal Intelligence Service posted to Frankfurt, Germany as a drugs and organised crime liaison officer.

Shields later moved on to the Metropolitan Police Service, where he rose to the rank of Detective Chief Superintendent. He once investigated a kidnapping plot against Victoria Beckham. He also led investigations which resulted in the 2002 discovery of a large weapons cache in Hillingdon believed to have been stored by a criminal gang or professional contract killer.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mark Shields (police officer)” is british police officer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mark, Shields and police, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1957, 2005, 2007, 1976—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1959-01-01. For this dossier, Mark, Shields and police is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “british police officer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

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 Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6769699. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1957, 2005, 2007 and 1976.

Critical limits

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.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Mark Shields (police officer)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Mark Shields (police officer) primary sources, Mark Shields (police officer) archive and Mark 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

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Mark Shields (police officer)” 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.