Law enforcement in Belgium

Two vehicles of the Belgian police: Federal on the left (two orange stripes on the bonnet and a single one on the side) and local on the right (light blue stripes)

Law enforcement in Belgium is conducted by an integrated police service structured on the federal and local levels, made up of the Federal Police and the Local Police. Both forces are autonomous and subordinate to different authorities, but linked in regard to reciprocal support, recruitment, manpower mobility and common training.[1]

In 2001, the Belgian police underwent a fundamental structural reform that created this completely new police system. A Belgian parliamentary report into a series of pedophile murders accused the police of negligence, amateurism and incompetence in investigating the cases. The loss of public confidence in the police was so great that the whole population deemed the reform indispensable.[2]

The three former police forces, the municipal police, the national law enforcement service (Rijkswacht/Gendarmerie) and the judicial police (assigned to the offices of the public prosecutors) gave way to an integrated police service structured on two levels.[3]

  1. ^ "Policing Profiles of Participating and Partner States". OSCE. Archived from the original on 2016-05-17. Retrieved 2009-03-16.
  2. ^ "Belgium to reform police". BBC News. 1998-05-24. Retrieved 2009-03-16.
  3. ^ "The integrated police: who does what?". Police Fédérale. Retrieved 2009-03-16.