[tzs]

> Police are civilians. Some people see this as hair-splitting, but it's a very important distinction.

I've heard that before, but never seen any good support for it. I checked several dictionaries, and they say that police are not civilians. Here are the definitions of "civilian" they give.

New Oxford American Dictionary: "a person not in the armed services or the police force".

Merriam-Webster: "one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force".

Cambridge English Dictionary: "a ​person who is not a ​member of the ​police, the ​armed ​forces, or a ​fire ​department".

Dictionary.com (which uses Random House, I believe): "a person who is not on active duty with a military, naval, police, or fire fighting organization"

Macmillan: "someone who does not belong to the military or the police".

There are some contexts in which "civilian" means anyone not in the military, but those are generally situations dealing with international laws of war or military law.

[woodman]

Dictionaries adapt to popular usage, so unless your argument is that popular usage is correct usage - dictionaries aren't good support either. Check the word origin, it originally distinguished those who are subject to civil law and those who aren't (US service members are subject to the Uniform code of military justice). Over the last couple hundred years it became less specific and was used to distinguish belligerents from the civil. More recently (as in I don't remember it being used this way 20 years ago) it has been used to distinguish those with authority from the lesser-thans.

I prefer the old definition, because now - due to the corruption of the word, we have no unambiguous word to describe the original concept. We already have plenty of words to describe those without authority.

[pbhjpbhj]

I'd say police aren't civilians because they're not acting in their own right; they're a specific designated extension of the state.

It probably depends on your state and your police force though. Gendarmes are military trained IIRC, also in Italy there are something like 7 different types of police.

[woodman]

You are describing an agent of the state, which is a different concept than what the traditional use of civilian addresses.