Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT strips 3836-3840 (24 to 28 September 2018)
gopher:
--- Quote from: Case on 27 Sep 2018, 22:42 ---I don't quite get all attention put on individual cities' police departments - are state and city police completely different and independent organizational units?
--- End quote ---
I believe there are about 18,000 different police forces in teh US. One of the effects of this is "Gypsy Cops". Most jurisdictions view firing/resigning as sufficient punishment for "Bad" cops, but the "Bad" cop just joins one of the other 18k forces. There is a John Oliver program about this contacting a cop who had been working for 10-12 different forces over about the same number of years.
bhtooefr:
--- Quote from: Case on 27 Sep 2018, 22:42 ---I don't quite get all attention put on individual cities' police departments - are state and city police completely different and independent organizational units?
--- End quote ---
Yes.
State police ultimately report to the state's governor.
City/town/village police ultimately report to their mayor typically.
And in between, as OldGoat mentioned, there's sheriff's departments at a county level. Sheriffs (the county equivalent of a city police chief) are often directly elected by the residents of the county.
Note that jurisdiction varies in different areas - for instance, in my state (Ohio), the only state police that anyone would usually deal with are the Ohio Highway Patrol, which as the name implies, are responsible for highways (a mix of enforcing traffic laws, and patrolling for stranded motorists). Sheriff's deputies may not have any power inside of a municipality within their county, because the municipality's police department is who has jurisdiction.
BenRG:
You know what I'd like to see? May getting a Transformers-like body that is either as a surface-to-orbit shuttlecraft or an upright humanoid form (and maybe a giant bear-dog beast mode because Dr Ellitcott-Chatham likes good four-legged girls). After seeing the latest Bumblebee trailer, I like the idea of May in a Giant Mecha body trying to fit into her usual routine and places; naturally, she ends up knocking over lots of stuff.
DSL:
And to expand on bhtooefr's comment about Ohio police jurisdictions -- how the differing levels work together can depend in large part on the personalities of the local commanders. Just recently I can think of a local murder case in which the sheriff "froze" the detectives from the city police force out of the investigation because the city police chief (who was seeking election as sheriff) criticized the sheriff's and his chief detective's handling of the case. (Coda to this: The sheriff is in prison for mishandling confiscated drugs and his chief detective is in prison for criminal mishandling of said murder case. The police chief, though, was not elected sheriff; a police sergeant from a neighboring township police force won the job on a promise to clean things up.)
And the highway patrol, though it still keeps the name, is very much the state police. They provide security for the governor and the state government, and (this always surprises people when it happens) they're formally the first investigators of any aircraft crash in Ohio, though they usually just collect information and hold the fort until the federal aviation investigators get there.
Zebediah:
And then you get into cases where there are police departments with multiple overlapping jurisdictions. I used to live in Raleigh, North Carolina. In Wake County we had:
* Multiple state police agencies - the State Bureau of Investigation, the NC Highway Patrol, the State Capitol Police and the State Fairgrounds Police (yes, the last two really were separate independent police agencies.) Plus a few others I’m probably forgetting.
* The Wake County Sheriff’s Department
* Nine different municipal police forces
* The NC State University Police and the Meredith College Police (it’s not unusual for colleges and universities in the US to have their own police forces)
* The Crabtree Valley Mall Special Police - yes, the mall cops were real police officers, with the power to make arrests and write tickets.
Try getting all of those departments to cooperate.
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