The term "Embryonic Police" held a double signification in the Uzdumalian Empire.

First, it was something of a joke, as the corps was not generally held in high esteem either in the general populace or among the police force as a whole.  (It takes a certain kind of ingenuousness, not befitting a serious enforcer of the law, to be thrown off the trail of those celebrating the Champion Feast by a flyer for a "Loser's Meal".)  An assignment to the EP was likely to be the first that an officer recieved upon recieving a place, and the term was sometimes used to indicate that the policeman was not yet really formed, not even really born, even.  This lessened somewhat following the Baloghs, but the EP was, with a few exceptions, never the home of great detectives.  Dynamo Club novels frequently consigned unsympathetic or boorish characters to a post with the EP, leading in some cases to the confiscation of entire print runs by angered officers, who did not thereby help their case.

This state of affairs was a matter of considerable irony, for the EP was charged with, in the Uzdan view, the most serious area of law enforcement of all: cultural censorship.  Their name actually derives from this charge.  The manifestation of cultural corruption was held to be the first expression of all crime, a sign that a rebellion was nascent in the area.  The idea was not so much that cultural malfeasance would encourage criminal activity or rebellion (this view would not even make sense, as the EP remit included not just rabble-rousing potboilers but, for instance, privately circulated collections of poetry whose influence would never extend beyond an audience of tens, who, one presumes, would not be encouraged to break the law by their reading) but, in accord with the Uzdan doctrine of the connectedness of all things and the flux of the future, that both were really the same thing, one the mature version of the other.  Thus, in a somewhat grisly image, the EP were to seek out dischord still in its "embryonic" phase and end it.  At times overzealous officers thought that this meant they were to stamp out borritism literally in utero, something that would in fact have been possible in some cases, as some borrits were so astonishingly deformed that this deformity was visible even before they were born.  In fact, Urgenbah-Fits-Under was one such borrit, and it was due to her desire to once and for all settle the question of whether the EP would have been right to prevent her birth that the years-long debate on borrits and borritism that came to be known as the Quarrel about Borrits took place, during which Goodbishop Yurm first came to prominence. Where Urgenbah herself stood in the debate she spawned is not clear, she having called for it, though given the fact that towards the tail-end of the debate she deliberately provoked a takedown of herself from Jonner-No-Bread, and provoked it by writing a screed that one can only describe as self-hating, one conclusion does tend to suggest itself.

Why exactly the EP, given the significance of their role, were allowed to persist in their near-total incompetence, is a matter of some dispute among historians, and was not unnoticed at the time. Even Devon-Lars I made no serious attempt to reform the corps---he noted that, even though the Balogh for entry into the corps was supposed to be extremely difficult, buffoons consistently passed, and did nothing further, seemingly satisfied with his effort as it stood. The most popular theory currently going is that the elite recognized that if the EP were actually competent, crime and unrest would increase, and therefore they deliberately crippled the force: panes et circenses on the sly.  This view, of course, implies that the upper echelons of Uzdan society gave absolutely no credit what are generally considered (by the very same scholars who put forth the preceding view!) the hallmarks of that society, especially the interconnectedness and unity of all things; I therefore find it unacceptable, though do not know what might better explain the phenomenon.  A very elegant view was put forth by none other than Targhand himself, in one of the speeches transcribed by followers collected in the volume titled Living Word.  There, he argues that the continuing incompetence of the EP refutes the entire Uzdan worldview from within.  Just as a borrit, he claimed, shows his worthlessness and depravity through the bad luck of his physical deformity, so too the very idea that censorship is needed, and that all things really are connected, as Uzdan doctrine would have them, is shown up by the astonishingly bad luck that would result in incompetent after incompetent recieving a position in the force charged with executing that very censorship.  (This explanation is absent from the Glorious Word, however, even though much else from that same speech is present.  Some suppose on that basis that it was not a real view of Targhand's. However, we have little reason to doubt the genuineness of the transcriptions, and Targhand did have an odd relationship to his own writing, so it is hard to say what to make of the disparity.)

See also:

Balogh-Isoherranen Exams

Borrits

Devon-Lars I

Early Targhandism

Jonner-No-Bread

Goodbishop Yurm

Urgenbah-Fits-Under

Works of Targhand