I was browsing through Wikipedia-Pages dealing with law enforcement in the United States.
What is striking is the sheer number of different law enforcement agencies on every level, all over the country, dealing with every conceivable specialty. So let’s say you are living in New York City. At one point or another, you could be interacting with law enforcement officers from one of these agencies:
New York Police Department
New York City Sheriff’s Office
New York State Police
New York State Bridge Authority Police
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department
Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor Police
Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority Police
Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police
New York State Park Police
Roosevelt Island Public Safety Department
State University of New York Police
New York State Forest Rangers
New York State Office of Mental Health Police
New York State Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Police
New York State Bridge Authority Police
Federal Bureau of Investigation
United States Coast Guard
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
National Park Service
Amtrak Police
and on and on and on…
By comparison, if I make a list of law enforcement agencies in Germany, I come up with: Local Police, State Police (the two are, for all practical purposes, identical), Federal Police, Customs Service and Federal Criminal Police Office (with whom you almost never deal with as a normal citizen). Add to this list: State Criminal Police Office (who mainly provide technical assistance and maintain databases etc.) and the investigative branch of the Tax Service.
But that’s about it.
Why are there so many different law enforcement agencies in the United States? Are there efforts to consolidate this mess? Who can keep track of all these agencies?
Each law enforcement agency has specific jurisdictional responsibilities. Take the last two on your list, National Park Service and Amtrak Police. Expecting one agency to cover national parks and our train system would mean they would have to be generalists. It’s more effective, and I suppose more expensive, to have numerous agencies covering specific jurisdictions.
So would it be more efficient to consolidate a lot of these agencies into one or two? Sure. Would it be as effective as having separate agencies? I doubt it.
I do not know the “why” answer to this, and I’m not sure there is a factual one. It seems like everybody wants their own police force because their organization is “special” or “unique” and for some reason they get it. Apparently something in the culture of American bureaucracy tolerates this.
I have observed this phenomenon in DC, where even the Government Printing Office has its own police force and I have no idea why. I am not sure what is required to authorize police powers at any given level–I assume that just because you are a government agency you can’t just go and decide to create your own police force.
Yes, but no one outside the US (except maybe Australians) really groks strong federalism. America really is a confederation of 50 sovereign countries, hung together by a relatively bare framework for cooperation and a common monetary system. The states are like Germany and Italy within the EU, not like provinces within Germany. It’s all about “the laboratory of the states” - letting each state run things as they prefer, within the fairly small number of limits set by the US Constitution.
The police power - the power to regulate everyday affairs inside a state, including law enforcement – rests with the state, not the Federal government. In fact, the Federal government is said to Constitutionally lack any inherent police power within states. Federal law enforcement is of an interstate nature.
That’s why every state has their own law enforcement, their own education system, and their own court system, that are sovereign from the control of the Federal government on a day to day basis (the courts, for example, cannot contradict the Supreme Court, but the federal government has no hand in their operation). And that will definitely never change soon. If they had to choose between dissolving the Federal law enforcement agencies, or federalizing all law enforcement, I am certain Americans would choose the former.
As dolphinboy describes, most of the agencies in that list have very narrowly defined jurisdiction. For example, a (TBTA) Bridge & Tunnel Officer in NYC, is literally limited to the bounds of his bridge or tunnel. He can only pursue someone off the bridge in a few clearly defined circumstances. Generally speaking, they are specialists in enforcing a specialist set of laws in a particular set of circumstances.
And, for example, the Amtrak Police might have training that concentrates especially on very close quarters operations as well as combat while standing on or in a moving vehicle. I once witnessed what I believe was a training operation or exam run by the WMATA Metro Transit Police where the arena was or included a real Metro train parked on a siding or rail yard near where regular rail service was passing by.
Also, specialization can help provide a better coverage of areas with a perceived need for additional monitoring. For example, your random urban city block might see sporadic or random patrols and may not have officers in the immediate area that can be dispatched very quickly to the location. Having a separate department whose job it is to concentrate on that location may help, thought arguably it could also be accomplished by having a special team within a broader agency, which, depending on the laws in place that authorize the police, might effectively be the same thing.
Now, if a police agency has its jurisdiction limited to, say, school property and the very immediate environs such as many Campus Police departments at college campuses, then the police really have no excuse not to patrol the campus and it becomes much more practical and quick to dispatch officers to Founders’ Quad to handle a protest that turned into a violent riot than it is to bring in random city, county, or state cops who don’t know anything about the campus and don’t know where “Founders’ Quad” is or what parking area is closest to the quad, let alone whether there are any hiding places nearby where there could be rioters holed up or if the walls of the adjoining buildings are bulletproof.
The first is federalism. As others have said, the United States has fifty-one separate sources of police authority.
Second is decentralization. Some countries centralize law enforcement and have one agency enforce laws in dozens of different fields. The United States tends to have smaller agencies that each enforce one subsection of laws. We have one agency to enforce drug laws, one agency to enforce traffic laws, one agency to enforce consumer safety laws, one agency to enforce airport security, one agency to enforce border security, one agency to enforce laws in a park, one agency to enforce laws on a college campus, etc. instead of having a single agency to enforce all of these laws.
Third is geography. The United States is a big country with a lot of geographical entities like counties and cities and towns and villages. Many of these entities want a police force dedicated to their own area rather than be dependent on some other region to send them police. So local police departments proliferate.
One very simple reason for Amtrak and metro transit systems (like WMATA in DC) to have their own police is that these systems cross state boundaries. The FBI is neither trained to handle everyday policing, nor interested in doing so. And because the states have such a strong tradition of autonomy, none of them are keen on having police from another state performing police functions in their own state. (Maryland wouldn’t be keen on a New Hampshire cop making arrests at Baltimore’s Penn Station.)
If you need cops trained in everyday, low-level policing, and with no institutional affiliation to any one state (or even any one municipal jurisdiction), creating a new force is often going to be the least-bad answer.
I was being slightly facetious, but yes, compared to places like Canada, where (as I understand it) powers are reserved to the federal government unless delegated to the states, US states have far more autonomy. People from weak federalist nations think they udnerstand the US federal system, when in actuality they are thinking about it all backwards from the USian POV.
That’s not correct, actually. The Canadian provinces are sovereign within the areas assigned to them directly by the Constitution. Canada is normally considered to be much more decentralized than is the US, and our federal Parliament is not as strong as the US Congress.
Specialization doesn’t really explain why there are so many agencies. For instance, in Paris, there’s a subway police, and a taxi police, etc… But they aren’t independant agencies. They’re just subdivisions of the general police, and a LEO in charge of taxis could tomorrow move to the narcotics or whatever else.
You can have specialization without requiring a different agency for every single thing or place.
How unified are the different departments of the German LEO, though?
If I’ve learned anything about bureaucracy anywhere, it’s that no one talks to anyone else, even within a single entity. For example, a recent issue with the IRS required talking to one agent to get a copy of a past return, a second agent (in a different department) to request more time to respond to a letter and a third agent (in yet another department) to get more time on a collections issue while we responded to the letter. It didn’t matter that they all worked under the name “IRS” - they each had very narrow areas of responsibility and I was going to get stuck on hold for 30 minutes at each phase of the call whether they transferred me or whether I dialed separate numbers each time.
So if Germany’s “state police train division” operates independently from their “state police bridge division” and they have jurisdictional conflicts when a train crosses a bridge, then the difference between the US and Europe might be largely superficial. (Of course, I’ve totally made up that example. I really would be curious to learn more about how other countries’ LEOs are organized and how they cooperate.)
It’s largely a matter of decentralization, which in turn is partly a matter of geography and size. For instance, Colorado allows some municipalities to be “Home Rule” cities. That means that the city has its own charter–the municipal version of a constitution–and the city can make its own laws and codes.
The American Frontier was settled by rugged individualists (“Nobody’s going to tell ME what to do!”) and that influences political issues such as centralized vs. decentralized control, even within the context of an individual state, and sometimes even within the context of an individual county.
The US has literally tens of thousands of separate, largely independent governments, and more than half of them are school districts or special taxing districts. (Water, fire department, etc.)
There are many overlapping jurisdictions (in NYC, there is Federal, state, city, and county/borough), any of which can choose to maintain a police force.
Many agencies call their security forces “police.”
Because, without going into too much detail, local police and state police are the same. Germany is made up of 16 states. Every state runs a police force which provides the personnel and resources for every law enforcement task there is. (The actual chain of command, however, in the big cities is different from that in more rural areas since elected official on the city level or the county level have a say in how the daily police work is run). But training and doctrine, recruiting, pay, procurement etc. is done by the state. The highest ranking uniformed police officer in the state is the head of a department in the state interior ministry.
As I said, for all practical purposes, you’re dealing with just one police force. In addition to that, there is a Federal police force which is charged with policing the borders, the airports and the railway system (mainly the railway stations).
At the US Federal level, part of the explanation is that the federal government isn’t granted the general authority in the Constitution to have a “United States Police Force”. Rather, given some area of Federal jurisdiction, Congress passes laws that include the authority to create a federal agency tasked with enforcing that law. So basically every time a federal law is passed that doesn’t fall under some previously established category, a new agency is created to carry out and enforce the law.