Law enforcement officer
public-sector employee whose duties primarily involve the enforcement of laws
A law enforcement officer (LEO), or police officer or peace officer in North American English, is a public-sector or private-sector employee whose duties primarily involve the enforcement of laws, protecting life & property, keeping the peace, and other public safety related duties. Law enforcement officers are designated certain powers & authority by law to allow them to carry out their responsibilities.
Modern legal codes use the term peace officer (or in some jurisdictions, law enforcement officer) to include every person vested by the legislating state with law enforcement authority. Traditionally, anyone "sworn, badged, and armable" who can arrest, or refer such arrest for a criminal prosecution. Security officers may enforce certain laws and administrative regulations, which may include detainment or apprehension authority, including arresting in some jurisdictions. Peace officers may also be able to perform all duties that a law enforcement officer is tasked with, but may or may not be armed with a weapon. The term peace officer in some jurisdictions is interchangeable with law enforcement officer or police officer, but in others peace officer is a totally separate legal designation with quasi-police powers.
Canada
In Canada, the Criminal Code (R.S., c. C-34, s. 2.) defines a peace officer as:
Peace officer includes
(a) a mayor, warden, reeve, sheriff, deputy sheriff, sheriff's officer, and justice of the peace,
(b) a member of the Correctional Service of Canada who is designated as a peace officer pursuant to Part I of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, and a warden, deputy warden, instructor, keeper, jailer, guard and any other officer or permanent employee of a prison other than a penitentiary as defined in Part I of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act,
(c) a police officer, police constable, bailiff, constable, or other person employed for the preservation and maintenance of the public peace or the service or execution of civil process,
(d) an officer within the meaning of the Customs Act, the Excise Act or the Excise Act, 2001, or a person having the powers of such an officer, when performing any duty in the administration of any of those Acts,
(d.1) an officer authorized under subsection 138(1) of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act,
(e) a person designated as a fishery guardian under the Fisheries Act when performing any duties or functions under that Act and a person designated as a fishery officer under the Fisheries Act when performing any duties or functions under that Act or the Coastal Fisheries Protection Act,
(f) the pilot in command of an aircraft
(i) registered in Canada under regulations made under the Aeronautics Act, or
(ii) leased without crew and operated by a person who is qualified under regulations made under the Aeronautics Act to be registered as the owner of an aircraft registered in Canada under those regulations, while the aircraft is in flight, and
(g) officers and non-commissioned members of the Canadian Forces who are
(i) appointed for the purposes of section 156 of the National Defence Act, (Military Police) or
(ii) employed on duties that the Governor in Council, in regulations made under the National Defence Act for this paragraph, has prescribed to be of such a kind as to necessitate that the officers and non-commissioned members performing them have the powers of peace officers;
Section (b) allows for designation as a peace officer for a member of the Correctional Service of Canada under the following via the Corrections and Conditional Release Act:
*10.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Law enforcement officer” as public-sector employee whose duties primarily involve the enforcement of laws. 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 public-sector employee whose duties primarily involve the enforcement of laws. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6503343. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Law enforcement 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.