I’ve lived here all my life and I still find it confusing.
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Then there’s the security guards with guns, the university police, the highway patrol, the mall cops, it goes on and on. America’s 58 layers of police is baffling.
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https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Uvalde-school-shooting-17212194.php
Law enforcement officials in Uvalde have asked the media to leave the school district headquarters or they will be criminally charged with trespassing.
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How to say “never” without using the word “never.”
I have family members who lost a small child to cancer about 20 years ago. They still grieve.
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Fantastic point. Around here, we have cities bigger than Uvalde that have county sheriff deputies that are assigned to the city and have patrol vehicles labeled with that citie’s name, but they are still part of the county sheriff’s office.
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If a city decides to spend its monies on a police force, they can go ahead and do so. I’m not sure if there are even any laws or regulations beyond those locally set for training or any kind of certification needed to do so. Less oversight than a state school board certifying teachers. Likely the white population saw the increase in POC population and said “better get us a SWAT team!”
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somewhere above it was mentioned that they have:
- the school police force ( with it’s own chief, officers, and staff );
- the city police;
- the sheriffs ( they’re also the county seat, population 25k );
- constables ( court police who can serve warrants );
- the texas rangers ( maybe something like rcmp? );
- border patrol ( they’re 50? miles to the border which is well within their jurisdiction. );
and maybe some others ( i forget all the person posted )
i hope people start to realize that if that level of policing can’t stop mass murder before it starts, if it can’t even stop it once it starts, no amount of policing can.
abbott and the gop defunded and unraveled everything that could help. they clearly want the chaos.
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It’s a ridiculously over-policed town, even for Texas.
The Texas rangers are state police. So yeah, US equivalent of RCMP. Those stupid hats are part of their uniform, BTW.
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Not when you consider that the police forces as we know them now historically started out as slave patrols, charged with hunting down and returning escaped slaves.
When you realize it’s about keeping everyone who isn’t rich, straight, male, cis-het and White ‘in their place’; the overall picture becomes much clearer.
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The RCMP are a federal force. They have similar duties to the FBI, in addition to handling policing in most provinces and smaller municipalities. Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland have provincial forces, probably equivalent to state police. Major cities have their own forces.
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So I loved the latest TV adaptation of The Flash. They really played up Barry’s mundane career as a police forensics investigator and had numerous examples of good, decent cops, doing the right thing. Mix that in with a lot of great action scenes of Barry as The Flash and other speedsters doing amazing things with their superpowers – running right through walls, running across water, throwing friction generated lightening, making “speed copies” of themselves, and even jumping through time when the plot called for it.
Yeah, it all did involve more than a little suspension of disbelief but at least the superpowers were somewhat believable.
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“Somewhat” is carrying a whole lotta weight in that sentence! I love superhero films (Marvel fan myself) but suspension of critical thinking is vital for the enjoyment. Just mindless fantasy escapism, which is just fine for a while.
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Undoubtedly, but it’s also in comparison to how believable the superpowers are when compared to the behavior, actions, and motivation of the police in the show!
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The more police agencies there are the more people any given cop can point to in the “not my job!” game.
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Indeed. In the end, it was a border patrol officer who finally went in and stopped it. Not the police, not the fucking SWAT team they have for some reason, not the Texas Rangers with their stupid hats, none of them. Border patrol fucking did it.
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Which kind of leads one to the horrific and very likely possibility that if the shooter had been a White man, they wouldn’t have stopped him either.
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TIL From what I’d heard/read RCMP fulfilled the kind of state-level policing the rangers are responsible for but for all Canada. Didn’t realize provinces had their own versions
Edited because I meant TIL not TDI. Dunno what TDI even is
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Only a couple of provinces, to be clear. RCMP are 90% of all policing outside major cities in the country. BC considered a provincial force at one point, but decided it made more sense to leverage the infrastructure, training, and resources of the national system. Otherwise you end up with a duplicate system that costs more, isn’t as good, and doesn’t really add value locally.
I used to live in Los Angeles, and in any given area, there are five or six overlapping jurisdictions. You might get pulled over by LAPD, Santa Monica PD, County Sheriff, California Highway Patrol, UCLA Police, and god knows who else. I once got a fix-it ticket and I had to drive two hours to West Hollywood to get it signed off because it happened to be an LA County sheriff who wrote the ticket and that’s the nearest office they have. Such a colossal waste of resources.
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Exactly like Texas. With rangers, sheriff, constables, municipal pd, transit pd, and school district pd all with jurisdiction in the same area. There’s even a water district with it’s own police force around here.
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