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September 29

Has there ever been a police service that transitioned to not being armed?

It's easy to find information about which countries don't arm their police forces with firearms, i.e. New Zealand, the UK, Iceland etc. In all of these cases, as far as I can tell, those police have been unarmed since their organisations were founded. I'm wondering if there are any examples of countries where police used to carry guns, but don't any longer? Dr-ziego (talk) 02:18, 29 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There are very few police forces that routinely go unarmed (list); you could go through that list and research each one. That would cover most cases, though it's certainly possible that there is a police force that was armed, then disarmed, and then rearmed again - leaving them off that list. Matt Deres (talk) 02:21, 30 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

After WW2, the German police – which had been involved in numerous war crimes and murders – was demilitarized and partially disarmed [1] [2]. This and other reforms introduced by the Allies (decentralization in particular) weren’t particularly well liked with the new German governments, and changed as soon as the late 1940s. German police was fully armed again in the 1950s [3]. Cheers ✦ _hugarheimur 08:29, 30 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Does this apply specificially to the occupation zones that became West Germany, or did the Soviets (who rarely acted in cooperation with the western Allies) do the same thing in their zone? --76.69.47.223 (talk) 20:13, 30 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Cheers. I suspected this was the case but wanted to check if anyone knew otherwise. There certainly don't seem to be any cases of police disarming which didn't occur in the midst of some broader change, i.e. the German police above or the Royal Irish Constabulary becoming the Garda. Dr-ziego (talk) 04:59, 2 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I’m not an expert, but as far as I know, the Soviets went (or at least wanted to appear to go) farther than the Westmächte in creating a new police force (rather than taking over a lot of the old personnel), a police force made up primarily of communists, and in consequence they had less qualms about arming them. Still, the Volkspolizei (“peoples police”), founded in July of ’45, was only armed in October of that same year (according to German Wikipedia, so would have been disarmed for at least some months). Cheers ✦ _hugarheimur 14:23, 4 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]