noun the police. Used with irony, alluding to the popular phrase identifying a city's policemen as 'the city's finest citizens'. In 1875, New York began to claim it had the 'finest police force in the world', a phrase borrowed from the claim of General Joseph Hooker during the US Civil War that he commanded 'the finest army on the planet'. In the early C20, New York began to refer to its fire department as 'the bravest' and the police simply as 'the finest' US, 1914