At the moment, there are general requirements for personal and business qualities, regulated for use in the Department of Internal Affairs, while the features of their severity for future employees performing different areas of official activity are not noted. The study is devoted to identifying and describing the features of professionally important qualities of police officers with different performance and performing in different areas of official activity. The study involved 78 police officers of the city of Arkhangelsk. Research methods: questioning for assessing the parameters of the effectiveness of performance; psychological testing of professionally important qualities of employees using regulated methods. Statistical processing was carried out using descriptive statistics, two-stage cluster analysis, Pearson's χ2 contingency tables, and multivariate analysis of variance using the SPSS 23.00 software package. As a result of the study, police officers were divided into two groups in terms of the performance characteristics of their performance, and differences in the severity of professionally important qualities of the groups represented were identified and described. Differences were established between police officers of different professional orientations in the severity of attitude to work and motivation of professional activity, cognitive, socio-psychological and emotional-volitional qualities and properties. Employees with high performance in administrative and preventive activities are characterized by high responsibility and effective performance of activities; high-performing administrative and managerial employees are characterized by a work orientation and commitment to duty, higher levels of leadership potential and friendliness, as well as high self-control and a desire for cooperation and mutual assistance. Employees of the operational-investigative direction of activity are characterized by great self-confidence, objectivity and rationality.