The functionality of the Police of the Czech Republic as part of the integrated rescue system in the performance of duties related to emergency and crisis planning

The topic of the thesis was mainly chosen, because in recent years many areas of the Czech Republic were repeatedly affected by floods of varying intensity and the police were forced to coordinate rescue and relief work with other units of the integrated rescue system (IRS). In practice performance-related police tasks were influenced by the quality of preparations (especially planning documentation) and decisions of the persons, who are entrusted with the rights and duties of coordinating the intervening units activities. At the same time no document, that deals with the issue, has been processed so far. The thesis is divided into theoretical and practical parts. The theoretical part is divided into three subsections. The first one aims to familiarize the reader with basic tasks, history, organizational breakdown and legislation governing the activities of the police. The second one examines ispecially the role of the integrated rescue system, its components, process and the role of emergency planning and related legislation. The last subchapter is devoted to crisis management, its bodies, related legislation and crisis planning. The practical part consists of a list of basic police tasks, which was created by analyzing documents prepared in the emergency and crisis planning for the capital city of Prague district. The police competences determined by the applicable effective legislation were subsequently applied to tasks of the list. The result of the above process was the finfing, which specific rules regulate the various police tasks, what specific permissions are officers abble to use to accomplish the task and where are the limits of their options. The aim of this thesis is to create a comprehensive document, that would contain the legal powers of the police and was especially useful in the practice of entities involved in the processing of emergency and crisis plans (including practical examples of the application of individual rights). In this context, there were formulated the following research questions: Suffers legislation of competencies of the Police of the Czech Republic from fragmentation (are the rights and obligations scattered in a number of legal norms)? Are police powers sufficient to perform all the tasks, which are imposed to this unit of the IRS by emergency and crisis plans processed for the capital city of Prague? The results of the thesis have shown that the legislation of the police activities is based on the amount of generally binding legal regulations, which are supplemented by internal regulations of the Ministry of Interior and the police themselves. Although the internal regulations don't have general applicability, they affect the performance of police tasks in practice as well. The fragmentation of legislation may cause an incorrect assessment of the police competencies by the bodies that are involved in emergency and crisis planning. By the coordination of the integrated rescue system activities, this documentation becomes one of the sources for decisions of incident commander or crisis management authority, resp. person standing at the head (especially the mayor or governor). In most cases these persons will not be experts in all relevant spheres and they will logically follow the documentation of the integrated rescue system, or documentation of crisis management. The quality of this documentation (or, conversely, lack thereof) will have practical impact on the success of the management of emergency events or crisis situations. Analysis of current documentation processed in the emergency and crisis planning for the capital city of Prague has shown, that most of the tasks assigned to the police corresponds to their competencies. There were also recorded some tasks that do not belong to the police competences. It involves the sorting of injured people by the START method and their transport to medical facilities by police vehicles