What is the difference between the police and the military?

The military and and law enforcement are similar in that they are both 'legal bearers of arms' meaning they legally have the right and even obligation to carry weapons and use force. They are different in what they use force for.

The police use force for the enforcement of the law. Their main goal is to capture the subject, by contrast the main goal of a soldier is to kill their opponent. Soldiers used as an occupation force will serve as police to capture unruly civilians not just shoot them as they would a combatant.

Another difference is training. Like said before police serve a different purpose so police are trained more for peace keeping and apprehension than combat. Soldiers are trained for combat first then apprehension and peace keeping last.

Police are trained to be less aggressive than soldiers and not shoot or threaten to shoot as the first action to gain cooperation.


The last difference is who they are used against. Police deal with the civilian and domestic population and are trained as such. Soldiers deal with combatants and foreign populations and are also trained accordingly. Basically the police control the population and enforce the law, soldiers control and enforce the borders.

Someone wrote:
They have rather different roles, and hence rather different training and equipment.

The role of the police is to suppress civilian criminal activity, maintain public order and safety, and keep citizens safe from crime. The role of the military is to deter hostile invasions from other countries, and to engage in combat operations overseas to support a country’s interests there. Basically, the police’s job is to make sure everyone within a given country is obeying the law and take action to make sure people don’t break it. The military is to stop other countries invading, and/or invade other countries.

Apart from the fact that both are armed and sometimes have to use deadly force, they are quite different. For instance, the police spend a lot of time looking for evidence of criminal activity and using this to arrest suspects and have them formally charged in court. The military doesn’t care about charging anyone in court- they simply engage the enemy in combat and hopefully defeat them. The police are intended to spend much of their time interacting with civilians who they are supposed to protect, whereas the military is designed to engage with hostile enemy forces.

They are both armed and occasionally end up in combat situations, but the military is much more heavily geared towards this role. Meanwhile, the police have additional legal powers that are required for their job; they can arrest people and detain them pending criminal charges, they can seize property as evidence, they can enter private property to search for evidence (although this and some other powers may require a warrant to authorise their use). The military does not have these powers.

The military quite deliberately has no standard law enforcement role, the rationale being that in a democratic society, a government should never turn its armed forces against its own citizens. However, many countries will use the military to support the police if a situation becomes too dangerous for the police to handle on their own. For instance, Mexico is using its military forces in the fight against the drug cartels, as the situation there has gone way beyond the capacity of local police forces to handle. The British government famously used its SAS military special forces in the 1980 Iranian embassy siege, as the police force at the time didn’t have the resources to handle a situation like that.

Soldiers make poor police, and police make poor soldiers. Soldiers and police are used for entirely separate functions and are trained very differently.

The purpose of soldiers is to protect the body politic from enemies of the state, from external threats. They exist to protect the people from invasion and to project force in their interest. They accomplish their means with direct and indirect application of force, primarily killing the soldiers of an enemy state and destroying its infrastructure.

The purpose of police forces is to provide domestic security to the body politic. They aid and support the people, and capture criminals. They act as a deterrent against crime and a reaction force to it. They function as stewards of the people, rendering aid and comfort in time of need. A police officer can go an entire career without ever drawing his sidearm in the line of duty, yet still have performed long and valuable service.

The essential difference is that function of a soldier is to exert force on behalf of the body politic, while police provide aid and security, which can be done without force. Never forget, at least in the US, apart from MPs and similar jobs, all police officers are CIVILIANS. Police are constituted of the people to aid the people.

When this distinction is forgotten, it inevitably leads to tyranny. Soldiers fight the enemies of the state. When they are used for domestic policing, the people tend to become the enemies of the state.

SOURCE: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-the-police-and-the-military

Nigerian police don't know their duty so as well as our soldiers.

I wish Nigerian government will learn from this.

I know somebody who will walk to Army barracks to rent a soldier to deal with a civilian.

Nigerian police and army that don't know their responsibilities. Well here's a few of their similarities:
-Both harass innocent and unarmed civillian
-Both collect bribes from the populace
-Both love to show force and intimidation
-Both run from vicious security issues like fulani herdsmen and bokoharam