Police board

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A police board, police services board, or police commission is an appointed commission of a local government charged with the responsibility of overseeing a local police force. Police boards may be required by government regulation, as they are in most of Canada, or they may be voluntarily formed by individual municipalities.

Police boards are generally established to create a degree of separation between political councils and non-political police forces, and are variously responsible for setting the policies, priorities, and budget of a police force; hiring the chief and deputy chiefs of police; determining the structure and organization of the police force; and conducting collective bargaining with police associations.^[1] Police boards are usually explicitly prohibited from making operational decisions.^[2]