UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- There was a heavy police presence at UN Headquarters this week but there was no emergency, it was the 13th annual UN Police Week Conference, which wrapped up on Friday.
The police were mostly chiefs of departments that had police components -- including whole units -- participating in UN Peacekeeping and Special Political Missions around the globe, said Deputy UN Spokesman Farhan Haq.
They represented approximately 11,000 officers from 88 contributing countries," he told reporters at a regular briefing here.
Earlier in the week, the police chiefs briefed the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations and the Security Council on community-oriented policing in disputed Abyei, safety and security in Mali and in the Central African Republic, Haq said.
There was also discussion on gender-responsive policing in South Sudan, preventing and addressing organized crime in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and strengthening rule of law in Haiti, he said.
Additionally, the spokesman said the police and their UN adviser, Luis Carrilho, called for increased deployment of women police officers in order to improve confidence-building measures with local populations and strengthen the effectiveness and efficiency of UN Police operations, the spokesman said.
"The mission of UN Police is to enhance international peace and security by supporting Member States in conflict, post-conflict and other crisis situations, to realize effective, efficient, representative, responsive and accountable police services that serve and protect the population," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said of their mandate in a 2016 report to the Security Council.
The police build and support, or, where mandated, act as a substitute or partial substitute for, police capacity to prevent and detect crime, protect life and property and maintain public order and safety under the rule of law and international human rights law, the Guterres report said.
"The breakdown of law and order often provides a trigger for the deployment of a UN peace operation," the report said. "Conversely, it is often the establishment or re-establishment of policing and other core functions of the criminal justice chain, in adherence to the rule of law, that allows UN peace operations to downsize and eventually withdraw."
