Grammatical Number – ‘Police Are’ or ‘Police Is’: Correct Form

In the first example, the object contains to only one process; immediate removal of pods from harvested plants (even though pods is a multiple). Therefore, is is correct.

In the second example, the object contains more than one process; protection against contact with the disease-carrying mosquitoes and mosquito control. Its more than one, so are is correct.

The word "police" is rather special: It has no singular noun form. Something like that police over there is securing the scene would be incorrect. One would always construct sentences in the plural form like so:

The police are out in force today.

Anything done by the police will reflect on them.

Other words that take no singular form would include pants, trousers, scissors, and clothes.

Confusion arises because "police" is also used as an adjective. Consider these sentences:

A police department is housed in that building.

The police chief was highly visible at the town meeting.

In these two sentences, we are not speaking of "a police". You could easily remove the word from both sentences and they would make sense semantically and grammatically. Instead, the word describes the department or chief. It gives us context.

"Police" also has a verb form. You may encounter it like this:

The Boy Scout troop must police the area before they leave to remove any trash.

The verb means "to investigate, to search, to clean up". This certainly does fit in with a subset of the duties of a police department.