Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT strips 3836-3840 (24 to 28 September 2018)
efindumb:
--- 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 ---
They are independent of one another. There are no villages, townships, or unincorporated communities in the state, those are part of incorporated towns and unless the town itself hasn't organized a police department thus necessitating the state police to patrol the town the town's department provides law enforcement. The state police, fire marshal's office, and Environmental Police are statewide and have legislatively mandated authority, thus operated in every city or town independent of the police chief and at times can overrule him/her and take over investigations. In all of the counties the local county sheriff's offices are impotent when it comes to law enforcement outside of providing aid in the form of communications, command centers, swat teams, K9 units, and additional manpower. They technically have police powers in their counties but are all but barred from exercising the option due to strong local police unions preventing the use without an emergency declaration.
efindumb:
--- Quote from: Zebediah on 28 Sep 2018, 07:38 ---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.
--- End quote ---
Your head would explode if you read the number of independent police agencies in the city of Boston...and I'm not counting the state-level agencies either!
BC, BU, Harvard, Tufts, Northeastern, Bunker Hill, Suffolk(University), Wentworth, MGH, Boston Public Health Commission, Boston Code Enforcement, Boston School, Boston Housing just to name a few....
Case:
Thanks for everybody who helped explain US police force structure to the foreign heathen!
German police is structured similar to the Australian one, i.e. they only have two levels - federal and state.
This wasn't always the case: Between 1945 and the 1970s, many German cities had their own, municipal police forces, but those were merged with state police in a reform in the 1970s, when they proved ineffective in dealing with federal-level threats (like the far-left terror group RAF). Today, many cities have their own code-enforcement forces, but they are not police, and don't have the same powers.
You can find e.g. the Cologne police's website - but they are staffed by what you'd call 'staties'.
OldGoat:
--- Quote from: efindumb on 29 Sep 2018, 22:37 ---
--- 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 ---
They are independent of one another. There are no villages, townships, or unincorporated communities in the state, those are part of incorporated towns and unless the town itself hasn't organized a police department thus necessitating the state police to patrol the town the town's department provides law enforcement. The state police, fire marshal's office, and Environmental Police are statewide and have legislatively mandated authority, thus operated in every city or town independent of the police chief and at times can overrule him/her and take over investigations. In all of the counties the local county sheriff's offices are impotent when it comes to law enforcement outside of providing aid in the form of communications, command centers, swat teams, K9 units, and additional manpower. They technically have police powers in their counties but are all but barred from exercising the option due to strong local police unions preventing the use without an emergency declaration.
--- End quote ---
Which state is this? I was thinking Connecticut but their counties are just lines on the map now with no governing or taxation authority. That redundant sheriff's office and county police department model is a big deal in New England. Strangely enough, it got transplanted to Los Alamos NM - the National Laboratory there is the main employer and imports scads of East Coast academics. And, yes, it can be a political mess when the state constitution says the sheriff is in charge but the local government is funding the county police for general law enforcement tasking. (Saw that in Maryland and Massachusetts, too.)
Morituri:
Here in the SF Bay Area, there's even the BART police. Their jurisdiction is the passenger trains and train stations of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority.
This overlaps with nine different county sheriff's departments and *umph* civil or city-level jurisdictions, as well as the CHiPs who are mostly supposed to be Highway Patrol.
The Jurisdictional confusion facing a transit system that cut across so many established jurisdictions was cited as a reason for creating yet another jurisdiction with confusing rules of overlap.
But why a light-rail commuter system has such a need for its own police force, in addition to all of the above, is a bafflement to me. They're essentially serving in the role of private security, except that because BART is owned by a government institution they have to be officially police?
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