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nouns - Why is "police" referred to using the singular pronoun "it" in this sentence?


With reference to this question Collective noun "police" — singular or plural? and as per my understanding police is always plural. But I got shocked after seeing police used as a singular noun in this article:



Two days after the death of the 23-year-old gangrape victim, Delhi Police on Monday said it has finalised around 1,000-page chargesheet in connection with the incident and plans to submit it in court on Thursday.



I can't figure out why they have used police as singular. It's one of the prominent newspapers in India. I doubt myself about its usage. Could anyone elucidate it further?



Answer



Singular the police seems to be very common in Indian English journalism.


Googling “the police have” and “the police has” with “site:indiatimes.com” yields claims of 1,430,000 hits for the plural and 525,000 hits for the singular—and on a quick “eyeball” survey the singular hits appear to be only about 5% or 10% false positives like “trust in the police has been shaken”. “site:hindustantimes.com” yields 246,000 for the plural and 32,000 for the singular, and “site:tribuneindia.com” yields a 7:1 preponderance of singular uses: 176,000 hits against23,000 hits on the plural.


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