Denver is also a consolidated city-county similar to Indianapolis, Louisville, Nashville, and a handful of others, so there is generally a 1:1 overlap of jurisdiction. I assume that means they can delegate responsibilities between police and sheriff based more on roles than on territory. It doesn’t mean they needed to do it that way, but since it’s a relatively unique situation I don’t know if it’s all that helpful to the discussion.
It might.
I mean, are two bureaucracies better than one? Maybe, maybe not.
Clearly all the various roles need doing. The question is, who should do them?
Also, (and not sure about Denver) but the elected nature of a sheriff is very different from the appointed police chief. I am not sure I am keen on elected law enforcement like this.
Are you talking about specifically Coloradan City & Countys? They are all coterminous meaning, for example, in Broomfield the city and county are exactly the same geographically so there are no unincorporated areas.
In Colorado, let’s say a bunch of people in some of our more sparsely populated areas want to incorporate a city. Do they meet CRS 31-2-101(3)(a) requirements?
(a) No incorporation election shall be held pursuant to section 31-2-102 unless the court finds that the proposed area of incorporation is urban in character and unless the court additionally finds that:
(I) The proposed area of incorporation has an average of at least fifty registered electors residing within the boundaries of the proposed area of incorporation for each square mile of area.
So just saying let’s start a city may not be possible.
No I’m talking about more traditional jurisdictions like Cincinnati and Hamilton County. I didn’t even know Denver was a consolidated city-county until I looked it up (Indianapolis I’m pretty familiar with).
I’m one of them. The distinction is that sheriffs can patrol anywhere in the county and police are limited to their town. My town is small in population but big in area so to ask the 3 officers on duty to patrol all within the city limits mean no other policing going on so they instead just patrol the home area and not out in the farmland leaving that to the sheriff. It’s not that we don’t want to pay for it, but the town cannot afford to patrol everywhere within our border.
Incidentally, I was stopped by a deputy for failing to stop while I was in one town while he was in another town (I was at the border). I don’t believe that can happen with police so there is also a multijurisdictional issue. Suppose there is a series of break-ins that crossover between two or more towns. Should that be handled by each city on their individual cases or the sheriff that can investigate all of the cases?
It seems like you think there is some sort of agenda going on with incorporated vs unincorporated and police vs sheriffs but there really isn’t.
In my county the elected Sheriff is also the tax collector. His office is located in the County courthouse. In the county seat, which is also a city(small one).
When I pay my way overpriced property tax, that covers the county school, the sheriff’s deputies pay and all the services they provide to city and county I’ll take the discussion up with him. I’ll ask him if his office and deputies are important to the county and should city folk pay taxes for him when they have city police?(There’s no city tax, that I know of)
I pay in October. I’ll let you know what his answer will be.
lol north LA County would go mad max more than it already is … but the sherrifs office treats anything past Santa Clarita as worse than dirt so we’re trying to start our own police dept …it will take years …
Are sheriffs and their deputies held to any particular standards? My local police force has requirements to become a police officer. The bar is not high (shockingly low actually), but there is one.
A sheriff is elected so can be anyone. Can they deputize anyone they want? Are there official standards they must meet to be a sheriff’s deputy? (police academy, schooling, marksmanship, physical fitness etc…I really do not know)
In Colorado, deputy or officer must both get their POST certification. Again, no hidden agenda.
The sheriff’s department is doing policing. That’s a big part of their job. And we do pay for it. Over $50 million a year in my county. Would your objections go away if we called them the “Kitsap County Police” instead of “Kitsap County Sheriff?”
No.
As I have said, I pay for my police to police my area.
I am also paying for sheriffs to police areas that do not want to pay for police.
I get wanting lower taxes. But pay for your own damn police. Same as everyone else. (this is not about process serving or court room protection)
All this talk about the sheriff being elected vs a police chief the the town appoints. That is a feature not a bug. In most communities, the police chief is expected to be an LEO. In small towns, they may actually being the one in the cruiser like Officer Bimbeau (what movie?) and needs to know the law, especially the town ordinances, inside and out. I don’t think of a Sheriff as a law enforcement office although they could act in that capacity (Is it true they are the only one that can arrest the coroner? I was told that.) With the variety of services the Sheriff’s Department does and how large they are, I think of the Sheriff as an administrator more than Johnny Law. Does anyone know of a Sheriff that goes on patrol? And except for Fightin’ Joe Arpaio, do any Sheriffs go into the field?
Why do you say this? People in unincorporated parts of the county still pay their county taxes. Those taxes fund the Sheriff’s Department, among other things.
I think you have missed much of this thread.
Y’know, at least in places like Florida, California and Arizona what I’ve read about happening is that small communities incorporate to avoid having to be subjected to county/school district taxes or being absorbed by a growing city and then subjected to theirs. Then they decide whether to run their own police or contract out to the county. But in sparse rural areas that is not easy in a practical sense, and as Saint_Cad points out depending on your state law it may be legally harder or easier to accomplish.
As was mentioned by someone else earlier, some of the complaints I am reading here tend to be specific to how one or another specific Sherriff’s office works, or even further, how one or another set of State/County/Municipal jurisdiction (and taxation) tiers is structured.
Except in some rare cases it seems everyone lives in a county. Not sure how incorporating saves anyone from county taxes. And, if they skip county taxes they will have new municipal taxes to pay.
I do know some places that incorporate to avoid being absorbed by another town. I saw this in Arizona where the city of Scottsdale was just gobbling up land and absorbing anything they could. I am not sure what was done but I know my parents, who lived in Carefree, talked about the city taking measures to prevent Scottsdale from absorbing them. Whatever they did seems to have worked…Scottsdale ends at the Carefree border now. But Scottsdale is a very large city now (250,000 I think…give or take).
(Back in the 80s Scottsdale was many miles from Carefree)
And so? What is you point. In my unincorporated community, as in many others we have a elected advisory board that reports to the Board of Supervisors, which generally go along with their suggestions- but not always.
Now I suspect most states have different ways of doing this, and maybe what you want is relevant to your home area. But not to California.
In CA all police have the same standards with a few weird grandfathered in exceptions- such as San francisco’s San Francisco Patrol Special Police (SFPSP ).
You know, I posted a while back about California’s requirements to be a candidate for Sheriff. Did you bother to read my post? And altho generally a police officer can temporarily deputize someone, almost every police officer in CA- as I posted here- has stringent requirements.
Right
I have no idea of where you are getting this absurd idea..
Also this idea, and you admitted upthread that you do not know this.
No, I think you are not reading peoples posts.
Out here, and in other states, people who live in unincorporated areas generally pay higher county taxes, as I explained before.
I do not remember you explaining that. I remember you asking me about it.
What would you pay if you incorporated?
Put another way, why not incorporate?
I’m assuming some overlap in the infrastructure between the two that can be removed due to redundancy if there were only one law enforcement agency like computers, buildings, HR departments, etc.
Did you read my post? I showed you that under Colorado law, many rural areas cannot legally incorporate.