The relationship between justice and the police: theoretical and practical aspects
Authors: Kunenko I.S. 
Published: October 2024

The text of the article analyzes approaches to the definitions of the concepts of «justice» and «police». By summarising different views on these concepts, the author proposes to establish a criterion by which they can be distinguished. According to the author, since police and judicial activities overlap in the implementation of the law enforcement function of the state, it is here that the specified criterion should be sought. In particular, it is noted in the work that justice is the sphere of direct implementation of the law enforcement function of the state, the content of which is the resolution of conflicts of legal and illegal interests, the denial of a committed offense and the establishment of the law in legal relations.
Instead, the police is appointed to carry out only operational and forceful enforcement of the law enforcement function, i.e. it is only an auxiliary activity in the law enforcement sphere (for example, prevention, detection and recording of certain types of offenses, search and detention of offenders, providing protection from them to individuals and legal entities, ensuring the execution of court orders decisions and sentences, detention of convicts and other types of coercion).
The boundaries of such auxiliary activities may be different in different states and even in one state at different times, but this does not change the fact that justice and the police play different roles in the performance of law enforcement functions: the first is the main one, the second is auxiliary.
In addition, the article points to the fact that justice is connected exclusively with only one law­enforcement function of the state, and the police is mainly involved in the administrative function.
Therefore, the criterion for distinguishing between justice and police, and, accordingly, their concepts, should be determined by what fundamentally distinguishes these state structures, making them different in nature in the system of state power; such a criterion is the nature of the functions of the state to which these phenomena are adapted.
The author notes that the police is a special institution of the state, called together with other structures of the executive power to implement the legal order ideally defined by the legislative power in the norms, actually establishing and maintaining this order in society, preventing and suppressing its violations.
At the same time, the specificity of the police in relation to other bodies of the executive power is that it acts as a «force» component of the executive power, has the necessary means and skills to use coercion, including forceful physical and armed coercion in order to maintain proper law and order
Justice, on the other hand, is called upon to ensure, within the framework of the law enforcement function, the authoritative resolution of contradictions between legitimate and illegitimate interests, denying offences and thus establishing legality and restoring the violated legal order.
The sphere of justice includes legal activities related to the establishment of legal facts, the investigation of facts of offenses, the resolution of legal disputes, determination and realization of the responsibility of violators of the law.