This article explains whether a firewall filter can be called in security policy or not.

The security policy is a stateful feature of the firewall whereas, firewall filter is stateless in nature, hence, it cannot be called in security policy.

Firewall filter is a feature to be used for debugging or restricting/allowing traffic on the basis of IP/Ports or MAC if applied in L2 environment. Whereas, security policy is used for flow mechanism in the firewall to route the traffic by the use of IP/Ports/applications that means covering all major layer of OSI model for the packet inspection.