The author of the article has studied the scientific positions of scholars on understanding and classification of the principles of law. The characteristic features of the principles of preventive police activity have been distinguished. First of all, they are formed and developed in accordance with the contemporary requirements, expectations and needs of members of society and the state regarding the protection of their rights, freedoms and interests within the public and legal sphere; secondly, they determine the social purpose, nature, content and limits of preventive police activity; thirdly, it is obvious that all principles of preventive police activity form an objectively conditioned, normatively fixed, scientifically sound, relatively stable “coordinate system”, the elements of which do not act in isolation but, in a certain interdependence, do not contradict each other and have distinct character in the application of police preventive measures and the implementation of the preventive function by the agencies and units of the National Police of Ukraine. The principles of preventive activities, depending on the method of their regulatory consolidation, are classified into: 1) general legal principles that determine the principles of formation and implementation of state policy in the field of national security; 2) basic principles that characterize the purposefulness, content and limits of police activity and are enshrined in the provisions of the Law of Ukraine “On the National Police”; 3) special principles that characterize the specificity of preventive police activity. The principles of preventive police activity should be understood as objectively stipulated, pivotal, relatively stable, scientifically substantiated guiding principles, enshrined by the norms of national legislation and international legal acts, which are the basis for the activity of the National Police of Ukraine, as well as the authorized officials of its agencies and structural units carried out in the process of forecasting and preventing offenses through the use of preventive police measures permitted by national law, and complex of preventive actions.