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Standing Police Capacity (SPC)

“The ability of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations to rapidly deploy a start-up police capacity adds an important new element to the United Nations ability to initiate a peacekeeping mission, as does the ability to dispatch personnel in response to specific requests for assistance from ongoing missions.”

Walter Wolf, Chief of the United Nations Standing Police Capacity
July 2009

The Standing Police Capacity (SPC) is a rapid response unit tasked with providing immediate start-up capability and with providing support, advice and assistance to police components of UN peace operations. The SPC was established in 2007 to respond to the need to provide the UN with a small corps of senior police officers and managers to organize the start-up of police components of peace operations and to undertake urgent mission assessments.  The SPC also provides expertise to existing UN peace operations in institutional law enforcement capacity-building.

The SPC’s first deployment was to the United Nations Mission to the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT) from November 2007 to August 2008. The SPC team provided police leadership, established police offices, sections and units, assisted in the drafting of key legal documents for MINURCAT and advised the Mission leadership on all issues related to policing. The SPC developed the curriculum for the training of recruits for a specialized police unit in Chad, the Détachment Intégré de Sécurité (DIS), that is responsible for protecting 300,000 refugees and internally displaced persons in Eastern Chad. Most of the refugees have fled the conflict in the neighboring Darfur region of Sudan. An SPC team was also deployed to the United Nations Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT), from May to July 2008, to assist the mission in reviewing the strategic handover of responsibility to the host-state police and to select and mentor host-state police officers. The SPC deployed to the United Nations Mission to Liberia (UNMIL) from September 2008 to March 2009 to assist the Liberian National Police (LNP) with their strategic plan and long term development program. This was followed by SPC assistance missions to the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti  (MINUSTAH) in March 2009.