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Portugal Public Security Police
The PSP was a paramilitary police force under the
jurisdiction the Ministry of Internal Administration. Its
basic
mission was the protection of property and public security
in
urban areas. Before its reorganization in 1953, the urban
police
had been under the control of provincial governors. During
the
colonial wars, security police assault units were
dispatched to
Africa, where they participated in combat operations
against
guerrilla forces. The PSP was reorganized and retrained in
1975,
and its heavy equipment was turned over to the army.
PSP detachments operated from divisional headquarters
in
Lisbon and from the eighteen districts of continental
Portugal,
which were divided into North, South, and Central zones.
There
were also headquarters for Madeira and the Azores and
sectional
headquarters in smaller towns. Greater Lisbon and greater
Porto
had separate commands. A specialized traffic service
shared
highway patrol responsibilities with the GNR Traffic
Brigade. A
special group, the Intervention Police, had mobile
sections
poised for deployment anywhere in the country. Criminal
investigation and data gathering was centralized under the
General Anti-Crime Directorate, which employed 1,500
specialized
officers and investigators. As of 1990, the PSP had a
complement
of 17,000 individuals. Staff was drawn from among former
servicepersonnel. Since the early 1970s, women had also
been
recruited for plainclothes investigations and traffic
control
assignments.
In 1989, a demonstration by some 1,000 police personnel
outside the Ministry of Internal Administration took a
violent
turn. The police had tried to form a union, but the
government
rejected the idea on grounds that the police, as a
military
organization, were prohibited by the National Defense Law
of 1982
from having a union. The police maintained that they
needed a
union to improve working conditions marked by long hours
and low
pay. In the late 1980s, for example, an ordinary patrol
officer
earned the equivalent of only US$390 a month.
Data as of January 1993
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