In one of my #supremecourtroundup posts last week, there was a request for more content of that sort. Since the Supreme Court is out of session right now, there won't be any call for a round-up post until the fall.
That being the case, and until I can come up with some other topics to write about, I figured I'd just open the floor. Is there anything you've been curious about in terms of U.S. law or the way our government functions? Even basic things are fine, it doesn't have to be particularly nuanced. Who knows, maybe your questions will give me some ideas for later, more in-depth posts.
Although politics is of course tied up into this to a point, I'd like to stay away from strictly political issues. There're plenty of places on hubski and the net as a whole to get into that.
Edited to add: Obviously I cannot give legal advice about specific issues; talk to a lawyer in your area for that.
So, fire away.
I kind of already know half the answer to this, but why are there so many law enforcement bodies in the US? Both specialized and non-specialized. Police, sheriffs agencies, highway patrol, state police, rangers/wardens, F.B.I., A.T.F., U.S. Marshalls, on and on and on. I know there's actually a lot of inter agency cooperation, but isn't it about time to streamline some of that stuff?
Yeah that's kind of a strange one, I suppose. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we have a history of decentralization overall, even if that's been changing over the last 100 years. So on the state/local versus federal level, it has to do with federalism. The federal government is limited to controlling only certain, specific things, and so can only penalize things within its purview. One the other hand, states can basically control whatever they want as long as they don't step over any constitutional lines or overstep onto strictly federal issues (such as international relations). But I would hazard to guess that a lot of it from the state level and below is tradition: when you had isolated communities they needed to have their own law enforcement. But even then you had the state level folks as backup, or when you needed someone who could operate across greater distances. Other times it's as simple as terminology, with different states calling people different things. So my state doesn't have a highway patrol, but we do have state police. It's also a way to more efficiently allocate resources. A small county may not need many police officers on a daily basis, but if something crazy does happen, then it's good to have state- or even federal-level law enforcement, with superior resources, to call on. There are also some things where it's good to have one organization be able to handle things anywhere in the country; the FBI for example does a lot of counter-espionage stuff, for example. As for the different types of agencies or whatever, a lot of it is just based on need, I think. So for example in some places there is only a sheriff's department and no police, so they handle everything (this is typically rural areas with small populations). In more densely-populated areas, I think the general rule is that sheriff's handle things like maintaining the jails, provide security at courthouses, etc., while police do the things we normally think of police as doing. But I suspect this could vary. You have forest rangers because they have to deal with things that regular police forces don't, and it's better to train people for their specific tasks (particularly the non-law enforcement ones). Again, a lot of it is, I suspect, some combination of historical accident and a desire to specialize. See for example the history of the Texas Rangers. Streamlining would be tough. There's a lot of inertia behind things as they are, and again there is some benefit to having more specialized people, whether they're from the same agency or not. I'm far from an expert on this issue, but hopefully this kind of answers your question.
Even if we were to create a unified police system, it would just end up the way it is now anyway because of exactly what you are saying. Every organization will have different departments for different things, and while people can think police do police work, different jobs between police departments are radically different. So if we had USPD, there would eventually be people saying, "OK you take this area, you take that area, you do this, etc". Eventually they would label themselves as a department of USPD. States also have very different laws between them, and even counties do. So it can also be a matter of knowing the law of the area you are in better. The law is set by representatives of state/city/county/municipality to better represent the people in the area. This is why local politics is actually way more important than national politics, because it impacts you directly more yet most people don't know much about their local political systems. The FBI itself already divides itself in similar ways to follow the areas laws better as well. So there are your state districts and then your federal districts. Your federal districts can sometimes cross state lines, they are set by the federal government and don't have to follow them (though IIRC a decent amount of them do for simplicity in law). It also can contain the corruption of a police force. A lot of our government structure is based on checks and balances and segregation and segmentation of power. If the police force in Baltimore gets corrupt, then it's just the police force in Baltimore's problem, and not the entire country's problem as a system of a larger whole. This also helps with data separation, you don't want ALL information to be known by all people, both for Snowden type leaks (while he acted mostly in structural designs, he had access to and very well could have leaked more damaging and life threatening or other major citizen data information). Separating some of that out helps there as well, but sysadmins are hard to restrict sometimes which is why Snowden needed all that access. Most people in the NSA wouldn't have more than their small little corner of their needed knowledge, and even higher up people wouldn't have access to as much as you would think. There is no Nick Fury master override in those systems, even the Director would end up contained but contained in his ability to modify a la the Top Secret compartmentalization mechanisms. With intelligence it's also good to note that there is a DNI office that they all communicate through for some level of unified policy and interagency coordination. The DNI (Director of National Intelligence) oversees the NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, DHS, etc, etc, (I think there are 20+ of them). Also with the Top Secret classification, it's not all based on willy-nilliness. There is actual mathematical set theory is based on the Bell-LaPadula model. Anyway, data security is probably one of the hardest things to manage with law because of all of the privacy issues involved. With government data, keep in mind that what you used to think of as records in a police station (FBI files, local PD case files, housing records, birth certificates, driver's license data, etc) are now records in a database instead, so that's what I mean with government data. It's very important to keep this stuff as segregated as possible for citizen's privacy reasons as well as for abuse, leaks, creepy stalkers, etc, but at the same time, you have to make sure that everyone has what they need to do their jobs. This is why the current surveillance debate is probably one of the hardest debates to not only follow and understand, and it is also the most important thing we will ever do and set right now out of all the policies we will ever need to set in the next 20-30 years. It can really change the entire trajectory our country goes in, and set us up for failure. Yet it's really dense material to understand and debate properly. Anyway, the physical separations of data is where I end up going to because I deal with it on a daily basis, but the same ideas can be analogous to the laws that police forces can enforce. If you restrict what laws a police officer can enforce, he can't just abuse his power. Federal police don't enforce local laws as an example. Take the two guys that rammed into the (NSA? CIA?) barricades about a year ago. They were arrested by that intelligence agency's security force, and since it was federal law they turned it over to the FBI since everything was suspecting terrorism. After they realized it was just a couple of drunk cross-dressers and cleared any intent to commit terrorist activities, they turned it over to the local police force because it was more of a local DUI matter.
Jurisdiction and specialization. The skills and tools necessary to track fugitives are very different from the skills and tools necessary to enforce fish and game licenses are very different from the skills and tools necessary to effect an efficient and legal eviction proceeding. The streamlining is at the prosecutorial level - you will either be prosecuted at the municipal level, the state level or the federal level and be subject to municipal, state or federal courts in peril of municipal, state or federal fines or incarceration. That prosecutorial apparatus coordinates with the necessary enforcement agency based on the type of civil or criminal infraction. You do not want to see an agency responsible for pursuing counterterror and poaching.