Should the US Combine All Police Agencies Into One Organization?



Should the US Combine All Police Agencies Into One Organization?

Introduction

Terrorism and increasing incidence of terrorism have forced the government to establish the Department of Homeland Security with an aim of enhancing the performance of local, state and federal agencies; immigration agencies; and intelligence agencies so that they can work together to communicate finding and make mutual efforts to fight against terrorism and stop activities of terrorism.

Congress has made several changes in the legislation to leverage police agencies and combat terrorism. One significant legislature that Congress is considering is consolidating all police agencies in a single national organization, in the United States. This power centralization might discontinue the discombobulate nature of three levels of government police, as well as offer an apparent, complete set of standards on how police fight against crimes and terrorism acts.

Discussion

There are several views about US combining all police agencies prevailing in the US society. Academic law experts and government service representatives supported this combination and argued that consolidating policies agencies could reduce duplicate efforts carried out by different departments, offers local police access to all available resources, and is cost effective. Officers in a huge number can offer consistent enforcement, wider distribution and improve training. Advocates also stated that consolidated services, laboratories and record keeping are all possible only if US combining all police agencies and one national police. Management and accountability might also enhance by means of effective consolidation planning (Hess & Orthmann, 2011).

On the contrary, opponents and academic law experts asserted that impractical goals and mismanaged consolidation planning might weaken the complete driven focus of consolidation. Local police agencies may not have a strong say as federal police may have, thus, local police may lose autonomy if all forces are combined in one national organization. Moreover, police agencies can focus on areas where crime rate are high on a routine basis; whereas, areas where low population are all but not remembered.

The above pros and cons made it clear that US must not do this. It might breach US federalism system and might be tremendously unwieldy, as well. In addition, there are different laws and enforcement priorities at different states of US. In most of the cases, state policies agencies are responsible for a deal with offense. Such offenses that are federal; however, the criminal laws are usually state laws. Hence, police agencies must not have the same control at local and state levels. Furthermore, US is a big country and has several ethnicities and different kind of societies that it might be very difficult to implement a single “one size fits all” national organization. For example, the police agency for 2,000 people community, and the police force for New York City has to be different and consolidating them together as a single national police organization might be useless (Thomas, 2010).

In case, there is no other way than combining all the police agencies into one national police organization, still it is proposed ...