Talk:law enforcement

There is a considerable tendency to use "law enforcement" as an actual plural (not just mass noun). You will hear – I suppose mostly in America – sentences like: Two law enforcement were killed during the operation. (Meaning: two law enforcement officers.) I'm not a native speaker of English, so I don't want to amend the entry, but someone capable should do so.

RFD discussion: May 2018
RFD sense "The various government agencies involved in the prevention of crime and the apprehension of criminals." --Per utramque cavernam 21:43, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
 * The usex ("The police and sheriffs are both law enforcement agencies.") belongs to the first sense, not that sense (since the word is written out). So, does that second sense actually exist?
 * What about the usage mentioned on the talk page? Is "Two law enforcement were killed during the operation." grammatical? If yes, that reminds me of this recent conversation about.
 * This sense seems defensible to me. I haven't looked for any cites, but something like "Somebody erroneously sent this claim to city hall; I'm forwarding it to law enforcement", which refers to a gov't agency. --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 22:13, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep. Widespread long-term use. Searching for a term like "call your local law enforcement" shows thousands of hits, with only a handful showing the words like agency, department, phone number, etc following. Clearly shows law enforcement as a stand-alone term for, as described, the various agencies.--Dmol (talk) 08:38, 3 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I've found some cites on GB with your keywords:, , . I'm closing this. --Per utramque cavernam 08:46, 3 May 2018 (UTC)


 * RFD kept: retracted by the nominator. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:04, 13 May 2018 (UTC)
 * In addition, this is even commonly used in abbreviated form as "LE". I've seen it used thousands of times on private forums and a quick Google search also shows it being used on other websites. Alexis Jazz (talk) 20:35, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Grammaticality of sample sentence
Nitpicking, perhaps, but the sample sentence for sense #1 ("The task of ensuring obedience to the law") was ungrammatical as originally written ("the duty of police, sheriffs and other government agencies"); the items linked by "and" are not parallel. I changed "agencies" to "officials"; it also would have been correct to write "police, sheriff's offices and other government agencies", but that's more cumbersome.--2603:6081:8040:E92C:9D4:9DF3:8587:45E7 21:06, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Alternative forms
Can get no explanation for why "law-enforcement" was added without qualification as a legitimate alternative form for the noun sense. I don't recall seeing the term hyphenated in a well-edited source except where it was used as a modifier, although I do come across it in news articles published by outlets that have been forced to fire their proofreaders, in which the hyphen is sometimes added randomly. In these cases it appears to result from confusion between the substantive usage (always unhyphenated, I would submit) and the attributive usage (where the hyphen is optional but should be included or omitted consistently by a given publication or author). Mere counterexamples would not prove that the hyphenated substantive usage is anything but a mistake; is there a stylebook that specifically allows it? --2603:6081:8040:E92C:9D4:9DF3:8587:45E7 19:25, 20 August 2022 (UTC)