I have seen that in some scenarios word police is treated as a singular noun and in some other scenarios it is treated as a plural noun. I don't know the exact difference!
Can anybody provide few examples demonstrating the scenarios when the word police is treated as a singular and a plural noun?
Does it depends on the context only to treat it as plural or singular?
Consider these examples:
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The police are blocking off the street where the accident occurred
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A police officer is getting information from the neighbors.
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The police department is at the corner of First and Main streets.
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The New York police force has a special counter-terrorism squad
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The police force is responsible for catching criminals
In the above examples, I can see the usage of 'Police' word as both singular and plural.
I need to understand the exact concept when it will be as plural or singular?
Best Answer
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:
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:
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 verb means "to investigate, to search, to clean up". This certainly does fit in with a subset of the duties of a police department.