They also protect Wintergreen.
I was always under the impression that’s what the NATIONAL Guard was. Am I wrong? (forgive me, not an American!)
Nope…there is no forgiveness for being a not American! 
(No, the National Guard isn’t a national police force…it’s basically a reserve military organization, sort of a modern day militia organization since it’s partly maintained by individual states and partly equipped by the federal government)
Wouldn’t that be skipping a step?
Shifting more responsibilities to the state level would have similar effects but be much less awkward constitutionally.
Hard to say. Apart from county sheriffs, no police forces existed in the English-speaking world when the Constitution was written. Not even in London.
If national police police police police, who polices national police police?
The first national police force was when Washington confronted the rabble-rousing Whiskey-makers.
I’m not even sure that a national police force is a good idea because, afaict, the key to effective policing is breaking down the wall between the police and the community they are policing. Pushing the executives out to Washington, I suspect, would make that particular aspect much worse than it already is.
I believe that the main issue with the policing issues we have seen recently comes from a basic distrust between the officers and the citizens, with a big dose of idiot behavior thrown in (note, the idiot behavior goes to both sides). With the distrust as the starting point any subsequent stupid behavior, either the cops or the suspects behalf, is more likely to escalate in a bad way.
The studies on community policing aren’t very clear. I think part of that is that community policing isn’t well defined and policies vary widely which makes studying the problem quite messy. However, my gut feeling is that the closer the police management is to the community, the more likely they are to understand that particular communities issues.
But I could be wrong.
Slee
It’s actually not hard to say. The federal government has no general police power. It would take an amendment to grant it one.
Alternatively individual state legislatures would have to “opt in” into the national police force; this is basically what every Canadian province bar Ontario & Quebec do (give the RCMP a contract to serve as provincial police while retaining municipal police forces). Nothing in the US Constitution would prohibit a state from folding all local law enforcement agencies into a single state police.
Good point. The states choosing to “opt in” could simply pass a law automagically deputizing all of the members of the national police force with state law enforcement authority. Ultimate constitutional authority over state law enforcement would remain with the state, but for all practical purposes all of the day-to-day operations would be contracted out to the Feds.
Cross-jurisdictional deputizing is already done sometimes by agencies that operate near borders - for example, the Washington Metro Transit Police can legally make arrests in DC, Maryland, and Virginia as long as the arrest is made within reasonable proximity of the WMATA public transportation infrastructure (no driving way out into the countryside and harassing farmers).
Here’s the problem though: if we’re doing this because of civil rights violations by local police forces, what does federalizing change? You either are bringing in foreigners to police local residents(all right, not really foreigners, but not people who live in the communities they are policing), or you draw from the same pool of people. And is the federal government really better at avoiding civil rights violations? Perhaps better about not singling out people due to race, but as far as respecting civil rights in general I don’t see any evidence that the federal government does a better job.
Also, the issue of race and policing, unlike many other forms of discrimination, doesn’t seem like a regional issue. It’s literally nearly every big city with a significant minority population. If New York cops, California cops, and Ohio cops are just as likely to commit civil rights violations as Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee cops, then you don’t have a local problem in any real sense that the federal government can address. You’re just replacing New Yorkers who work for New York with New Yorkers who work for DC.
I think one of the big points is that the Feds, in contrast to local departments, have a huge budget and infrastructure to veeeery carefully screen police candidates and provide the most top-notch training. In other words, the states would be hiring professionals, not some random locals that happened to stop by and passed a basic background check.
I’ll point out that one of the least respected law enforcement agencies is the TSA, which is a federal agency and has the kind of resources you describe.
Well obviously bringing in a federally run national police force for municipalities is a non starter, as far as it being mandatory. Just no way politically or legally. But in Ontario smaller.municipalities can opt to farm out local policing to the Provincial police and the same can be done in other parts of the country with the RCMP. Some sort of voluntary opting out of local policing by municipalities could be feasible and perhaps shake up the status quo.
Oops sorry alphaboi. I see you brought up the same point.
If anything, we need police that are more community based and not less. A big part of the current problem is police who have no connection to the areas they patrol, and basically act like an occupying army.
I think we also need to get a better handle on what residents actually want and what tradeoffs they are willing to make. It could very well be that the current state of affairs is the best possible outcome. It’s not like we had less African-American kids getting shot by police before we got tough on crime.
Community based policing does not equal hiring police who grew up in that community. If that was the case most municipal police forces could be called community based entirely. It has to do with continued communication and forming a strong relationship between the police and the locals. There is no reason a person who is paid by the State or Feds can’t do outreach, if that’s what we ask them to do.
Which would be illegal racial (and possibly other) discrimination in many communities anyways.