Anyone is allowed to do this. I can drive to Brooklyn right now and walk up and down the public streets and report any violations of the law I see, or indeed make a citizen’s arrest to the extent that NYC law allows it.
But that would be under civil law, not for violating another person’s idea of how you should be behaving according to their religious beliefs.
Then I misunderstand. What are these groups doing when they “patrol the public streets of Brooklyn”?
No doubt. Please don’t. We have enough problems with the people already doing that.
Are you implying that the church police would have the authority to enforce church rules? Like, they could arrest people for saying “Jehovah”?
I don’t think it works that way—does it? Private police are still in the business of law enforcement—does that include the private “laws” of their employers?
The Shomrim do not, generally, do that.
There are anecdotal reports (just people in Brooklyn talking) of them enforcing religious strictures within the Hasidic community (for example, Hasidic women wearing stockings the Shomrim deem too sheer may be chastized). Stuff like that.
But they don’t seem to have any interest in enforcing ultra-Orthodox codes of behaviour upon non-Jews, or upon non-Hasidic Jews.
They don’t appear to be acting as religious police.
This is what I was thinking of though I see I had the wrong group.
I believe that a private security company (Securitas?) has full law enforcement authority at the Honolulu airport. At least that’s the way it was last time I was there.
Every one of those organizations has its own police force because they want more uniformed officers than the local government can provide on regular patrols. In addition to all those listed, there’s also have a special policing district in downtown St. Louis, where the taxpayers in that district pay the city to assign X number of units directly to the area. A two square mile area of downtown may have 5 or 6 police units working it during the daytime, while a two-square mile residential neighborhood might see a cop car once a day. And the downtown residents and businesses are paying extra to make sure that happens. Is that different from a single business (or college, or church) establishing its own police force?
Disagree. The Supreme Court may have dented it this week in the American Legion case, , but saying it’s dead and gone is premature. But even by your narrow interpretation, the Briarwood case is iffy: Alabama authorizes and uses tax money to train Briarwood cops at the state police academy. It specifies Briarwood Church. Since it doesn’t authorize other churches, synagogues, or mosques to have cops, that’s pretty clearly not neutral.
It’s not a law, counselor; it’s an amendment in the US Constitution, and Jefferson and Madison would disagree with you. They believed making people pay taxes to support a faith other than their own was a violation of natural rights.
That’s not what the Alabama law says. It specifies Briarwood Church and 10 colleges/universities. It says nothing about other churches.
Still, what could they do to Hasidic Jews? They cannot arrest them. Perhaps report them to the religious authorities? How is this any different than one Southern Baptist seeing another at the grocery store with beer in his cart and telling the preacher?
There is nothing to suggest that the Legislature did, or would only allow Briarwood Church this permission because it is a religious organization or that Briarwood Church is somehow the official religion of Alabama. Presumably (and I don’t know) Briarwood is of sufficient size that reasonable secular policies would allow a person to believe that having its own police force is prudent. And, again, this isn’t the Jesus police; they simply patrol the campus and enforce laws much like university police.
Is there any evidence that other similar non-religious groups have been denied the right to a private police force?
Tax dollars training police to protect a church is not a religious function. If there is a murder at a church, should the police not investigate? I don’t see the difference, even if these officers patrol exclusively at a church, just like how some officers work exclusively at sporting events.
It is law as in case law interpreting the First Amendment. The Lemon test is both dented and dead. Everyone criticises it because anyone can reach any result under it. It is not really a test at all.
Many laws do this. As long as the inclusion of the church was not for religious reasons, I don’t see the issue.
The Constitution IS the law.
Something occurred to me a few minutes ago. Does Alabama law require a specific statute be enacted each time a community (city, town, county, etc.) wishes to create a sworn police department?
I admit I find this response to be kind of a non answer. If the local government is not providing a sufficient number of patrols to enforce the law, surely the solution is for more resources to be devoted to that, rather than creating another police force?
I live in the Town of Oakville, which is policed by the Halton Regional Police Service. If it were to come to pass that my neighborhood were underpoliced, the logical approach is to have the HRPS dedicate more police officers to it. Setting up a “South Central Oakville Police Department” would be objectively stupid; there is no possible way you could do that half as efficiently as just adding a few more officers to the HRPS.
It’s very difficult for me to believe that the Briarwood Church needed its own police department. It’s a big CHURCH, but 4,000 people (at least half of whom don’t actually live there) isn’t that many people to police. Looking at the map, you could walk across campus in three minutes.
I can see why one would have special police forces in situations where the specific nature of the policing that needs to be done requires a specialty that the larger police force might not be suited for. A state highway patrol, for instance, or the security force in an airport - there are arguments for that, but hell, even in those cases it’s really more a matter of turf wars and budget arguments.
On the other hand I can see a dozen reasons why this is a dreadful idea.
At the very least they’d come in handy if you found a dead bishop on the landing.
Local government (including policing) and its funding are so atomized in most of the USA that this isn’t necessarily politically feasible. I’m not sure this church is really large enough to go into this category, but universities can totally outstrip the local jurisdictions they reside in while not necessarily providing commensurate revenue.
I’m not denying that it would be stupid, but if Oakville were in a typical US state, there would probably be a South Central Oakville Police Department, because modern Oakville would simply never have been created by the forcible merger of the old Oakville with Bronte, Palermo, Sheridan, and Trafalgar Township. And policing would never have been consolidated at a level above that.
Okay, you’re in south central Oakville. Let’s say you’re happy with the police protection you receive. Now, suppose in North Oakville there’s a university that occupies about 70 hectares and has about 15,000 students. They want a LOT of police protection. Do you want to pay the increase in taxes it would take to pay for 57 additional staff, including 33 uniformed officers, to handle those added patrols?
I know there’s a cultural divide here, but in the U.S. I’ll bet most people/taxpayers/voters would at least want to charge every one of those 15,000 students a head tax, if not throw the university out, plow the 70 hectares and put in houses.
I can see the budgetary problems, but the safe, logical thing for the University of Shitville to do is to pay the Shitville PD for the added cost of a number of cops with the agreement that they will patrol UofS. Private interests and subjurisdictions do this sort of thing, too. On a large scale, for instance, most of Canada’s provinces pay the RCMP to provide local policing rather than setting up their own provincial cops (like Ontario and Quebec do.) On a smaller scale, it’s not uncommon for sports teams to pay a little extra for cops to provide security services at games.
Your point about the atomizing of municipalities is a good one but, after all, counties and regions do figure this shit out sometimes. Oakville, to use that example a little further, is a separate municipality from Burlington and Milton but they share a police force (but don’t share a fire department) so there is a choice there. I’m not saying the politics are easily overcome, but it can be done.
TL;DR RickJay, your world and my world just aren’t the same.
With all due respect, I see that Burlington has a population of 42,000, Milton has about 11,000, and I can’t even find an Oakville, Vermont on Google or Google maps. The entire, three-county Burlington Metro Area has a combined population of 213,000, which makes much it about 70% of the population of the supposedly decaying rust-belt City of St. Louis, MO. That’s not “police.” In the Midwest, your area’s geographic size and population would fit nicely into a Missouri county Sheriff’s department.
Meanwhile, here in Shitville the latest proposal for combining St. Louis City and County, and folding all the little suburbs in it into the combined megacity, has recently blown up for a lot of reasons. One of the major ones was that all the little Shitvilles in the county want to keep control of their municipal services. At the very top of the list is police and fire services. This holds true not only for affluent suburbs with excellent (if small) police departments, but also with poorer, smaller municipalities whose police seem to occupy themselves with radar traps on major roads. Putting it bluntly, the people of the Shitville metropolitan area won’t trust a Greater Shitville Unified Police Department.
I mentioned Washington University in Shitville. Shitville University (despite the name, it’s also a private school) has about the same enrollment but the added burden of being an urban university with busy city streets cutting through the campus. They don’t have “police,” but say about their Department of Public Safety officers.
Maybe not a “police” department, but potato/potahto.
The other major educational institution, the University of Missouri-Shithole calls their security “police” but it’s pretty clear from the University itself it’s really just a security department.