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"police call"

Bikewer

Penultimate Amazing
Bikewer
Joined
Sep 12, 2003
Messages
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Location
St. Louis, Mo.
Anyone who's been in or around the military knows that to "police up" the area is to pick up trash, and "police call" is a morning ritual to do same...

But in response to a Quora question today, I tried for about 20 minutes to find the origin of this term... How "police" became a synonym for "picking up trash".

Lots of sites repeated the meaning.... But no origin.

Perhaps as simple as the Police "picking up" (arresting) "trash" (criminals). Any ideas?
 
I've never heard the "police call" variant.

I have used the phrase "police the area", without giving much thought to the origin. I always associated with putting things in good order. Getting everything "ship shape", a term I have also used. I thought of it like a policeman demanding everything get put into its proper place, and anything that doesn't belong removed. Sort of enforcing the "law", where in this case the law is just that all the trash be picked up.
 
Here's a dictionary that might be of use:

Archaic Regulation and control of the affairs of a community, especially with respect to maintenance of order, law, health, morals, safety, and other matters affecting the public welfare.


So, perhaps the term "police" which we use today originally came from a different verb. "Policing" wasn't specifically law enforcement. it was the act of general community upkeep and maintenance of order, a task which would be assigned to that group of people in the blue shirts, who were called "police", because that's what they did.

In other words, the idea of "policing the area", as cleaing up, might have preceeded tha use of the term "police" to designate law enforcement officials.
 
'Police' (the noun) comes from police (the verb) which English stole from French and meant (loosely) public order; it came from the Latin and Greek and originally from 'polis' a city.
Politics has a similar root. Though not alas polite.
 
Can’t speak to its veracity, but I always thought it came from actual police tactics. When searching a large crime scene, police personnel would often use a similar method: line everyone up one side, and walk the area picking up anything they found. I always assumed the term and practice came from that, but it’s word-of-mouth info.


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Meadmaker said:
I've never heard the "police call" variant.

I have used the phrase "police the area", without giving much thought to the origin. I always associated with putting things in good order. Getting everything "ship shape", a term I have also used. I thought of it like a policeman demanding everything get put into its proper place, and anything that doesn't belong removed. Sort of enforcing the "law", where in this case the law is just that all the trash be picked up.
Click to expand...


You've heard it if you've seen Full Metal Jacket:


HARTMAN​
Reveille! Reveille! Reveille! Drop your :rule10 and grab your socks! Today is Sunday! Divine worship at zero-eight-hundred! Get your bunks made and get your uniforms on. Police call will commence in two minutes!
 
I don't know if it's specifically picking up trash. On NCIS, there are frequent references to a shooter "policing their brass", picking up their shell casings after they've shot someone to prevent them from being collected as evidence.
 
Policing up fired brass is part of the general military obsession with neatness; I think that LEOs borrow the term from that.

The antiquity of the usage is clear, and if it continues in use today, that's just brown-shoe Army conservatism. Not a thing wrong with it.

To this day, I tend to stoop and police up tiny bits in my surroundings. Don't want that +*☆¿#! drill sargeant on my ass.
 
Only slightly off-topic. While picking up the morning’s trash, you’d come to hate filtered cigarette butts, as they always made up a fair chunk of the junk.
Folks who smoked non-filters (remember, this was the 60s…) were advised to “field strip” their butts. (Another military term). That meant to tear them apart so that they didn’t need to be picked up.
Doing this was particularly annoying to me, even then a non-smoker.
 
Field-stripping cigarettes isn't limited to nonfilters, or military personnel. As a hiker, I carried a small plastic bag to put used filters in, and packed them out with me. Field-stripped them so it was *just* the filters.

I surprised a couple of ex-mil people doing that whenever I was out in nature. Just force of habit for me, even then (70's-80's).
 
Pope130 said:
And don't forget KP, "Kitchen Police".
Click to expand...

Ah, which leads maybe to the answer that Bikewer was looking for:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KP_duty

Etymology

The U.S. military sometimes uses the word "police" as a verb to mean "to clean" or "to restore to order." For example, after a company picnic on a U.S. Marine Corps base, a group of Marines might be assigned to police, or clean up, the picnic grounds. Its origins in this usage probably came from the French sense of maintaining public order. Kitchen police then may mean to restore the kitchen to order, or clean up the kitchen. The term "KP" has been used in the United States since as early as 1918.[2]
Click to expand...

Each branch of the military seems to have its own jargon too. "KP" wasn't a term I often heard used much in the Navy. We referred to it as galley duty, whereas other branches called it mess duty.

Here's a link about some of the terms commonly used in the Navy:

https://www.history.navy.mil/resear...alphabetically/o/origin-navy-terminology.html
 
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