Detașamentul de Poliție pentru Intervenție Rapidă

From the administration point of view, Romania is divided into 40 counties (judete) plus Bucharest. Each county (judet) is centered around a municipality. Each one of the 40 municipalities has a main police headquarters for that county. Starting with the 1990s, the municipalities' police sections have created Rapid Intervention detachments, to participate in operations which could pose a life-threatening risk to the officers involved in carrying them out. The detachments were first called DIAS, which stands for Detasamentul de Interventii si Actiuni Speciale, or the Special Actions and Interventions Detachment. DIAS groups have been formed in all 40 municipalities, as well as in Bucharest. In 1997 however, Constantin Dudu Ionescu, who was then heading the Ministry of Administration and Interior (MAI), has signed the order for creating a much larger organization, called SPIR. SPIR was basically a much-enlarged DIAS, which was now composed by several teams, plus logistics and support structures, etc. In november 2001, all 40 municipalities were obliged to change the names of their special detachments from DIAS to DPIR. DPIR stands for Detasamentul Politiei pentru Interventie Rapida or the Police Rapid Intervention Detachment and is basically a simple renaming of DIAS. Although all municipalities have their own DPIR teams, in some of them the detachments have different names. In the city of Bistrita for example, the combatants still wear uniforms marked with DIAS, while in Bacau the detachments are called DIR (not to be confused with an elite unit from the MoD, DIR MApN, which is a world-class anti-terrorist unit). In Piatra Neamt, the team acts under the designation SIR, and is an entire Service, similar to SPIR in Bucharest. To avoid confusion, all detachments which are under the command of the municipalities are practically referred to as DPIR, while the service in the capital city of Bucharest is referred to as SPIR. In each municipality, DPIR is composed by the combatant detachment DIAS and the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) detachment DIR. In Bucharest, SPIR is composed by several detachments, which include the DIAS and DIR. Therefore, although Romanian newspapers and TV stations have unanimously adopted the names DPIR/SPIR for the action teams, the population and personal websites/blogs still use the nomination DIAS. Depending on point of view (DIAS being incorporated into DPIR/SPIR), they are both halfway correct. WikiRaptor 11:35, 9 March 2006 (UTC)