- ID
 - 5444356
 - Banca
 - CESPE / CEBRASPE
 - Órgão
 - PM-AL
 - Ano
 - 2021
 - Provas
 - Disciplina
 - Inglês
 - Assuntos
 
   The body of officers representing the civil authority of 
government is known as police. Police typically are responsible 
for maintaining public order and safety, enforcing the law, and 
preventing, detecting, and investigating criminal activities. These 
functions are known as policing. Police are often also entrusted 
with various licensing and regulatory activities. However, police 
scholars have criticized this popular understanding of the word 
“police” — that it refers to members of a public organization 
having the legal competence to maintain order and enforce the 
law — for two reasons. First, it defines police by their ends rather 
than by the specific means that they use to achieve their goals. 
Second, the variety of situations in which police are asked to 
intervene is much greater than law enforcement and order 
maintenance.
   There is now a consensus among researchers that the 
common feature among all the different agencies engaged in 
policing is the legal competence to enforce coercive, 
nonnegotiable measures to resolve problematic situations. Such 
situations are characterized by their potential for harm and the 
need to solve them urgently before they develop that potential. 
Hence, the actual use of coercion or the threat of using it allows 
police to put a quick, nonnegotiated, and conclusive end to 
problematic situations. 
Internet: <www.britannica.com> (adapted). 
        Based on the text above, judge the following item.
In the sentence “The body of officers representing the civil 
authority of government is known as police” (first 
paragraph), the word “representing” could be correctly 
replaced both with the phrase which represents and which 
represent, although each option has a slightly different 
meaning.