Opus 2020-140: Headlines: In Your Dreams

A popular mantra from the left today is “defund the police”.  That sounds so simple.  It would actually be a bit complicated.  There are multiple levels of law enforcement.  At the bottom you have the city police.  They are headed by a police chief that is usually appointed by the city council so they respond to that group.  I read that for all their talk in Minneapolis, the city charter requires the city council to maintain and support the police department.  Evidently they would need to have the people of Minneapolis vote a change in the charter to make that happen.  If the 16% support that has been claimed is true, good luck with that. 

Then you have the county sheriff in most areas.  Everywhere I have been the sheriff is elected by the people in the county, elected not appointed.  That is important.  I assume there is a county board of some kind that supervises, but the sheriff is not a political appointee, he is elected.  If you don’t like what he does then vote him out.  If the local cities defunded the police then the county would step in because the vacuum will be filled by someone and the people who don’t live in the city will want order.  In California there were cities that had no police force or fire department.  They contracted with the Sheriff’s Department for coverage and the county for fire protection. 

In Texas we have another level called the Constable.  I asked a Constable one time what the deal was.  He laughed and said that if you ever need to arrest a Sheriff you call the Constable.  I cannot figure out what their distinction is.

We also have a state highway patrol, the Texas Rangers and the Department of Public Safety.

Cities have the choice of forming a police force.  It is not required in Texas.  I guess that means they could do away with it too.  That would just shift the job to someone else and in the process I am sure that the taxes would be adjusted.  It would also pass the control away from the local city to another government agency.  It would be Law Enforcement Whack-a-Mole.

We life in interesting times, in the Chinese proverb sense. 

homo unius libri