https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/21/uvalde-shooting-too-many-police-departments/
Instead of spending money on education, school districts are creating their own police departments, with a huge reason being thebout-of-control gun access and violence in this country. In writing about the Uvalde police who stood around doing noting for more than an hour, the writer says,
“All were waiting for the word “go” from a person they knew to be in charge.
These failures all stem from the same root cause: America has far too many police departments.
By piecing together various accounts, we conclude that officers were quickly on the scene from at least four agencies: the Uvalde school district police, the Uvalde city police, the Uvalde county sheriff and — eventually — the U.S. Border Patrol. Texas Rangers arrived at some point, as did the FBI. That’s six agencies in a city of about 16,000 people.
Anyone who has ever tried to make two bureaucracies cooperate efficiently under the best of circumstances can perhaps appreciate the difficulty of making four, five or six bureaucracies work together under the worst.
This proliferation of jurisdictions is a distinctly American problem. According to one ballpark guess, the United States is home to around 18,000 distinct police agencies. Sweden has one. Canada spans a continent, like the United States. Canada comprises local and provincial governments gathered into a federated whole, like the United States.
But Canada has fewer than 200 agencies.
That’s right: The United States has close to 100 police agencies for each one in Canada.
According to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, nearly 150 school districts in Texas alone have created their own police departments since 2010.“
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