Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

The organizational structure of many US government organizations still seems strange to me.

The DHS's restructure after 9/11 seemed to make sense (from my viewpoint as an outsider) even if it looks like they outsourced the branding of it to the 3rd Reich.

The Secret Service has dual roles of protection of certain officials and their families and investigating financial crimes. I understand the Secret Service's history as a sub-department of the Department of the Treasury made sense, but it still seems weird to have two very different, yet very specialized roles.

And then there's this weird new requirement that very many US Government departments have their own tactical officer squads. Can't we just have a National Police (a merged FBI, US Marshals, etc)? The current silo system reeks of each silo budget hoarding.

All of this to say: The SEC now needs to compete with the other branches of government to hire the best InfoSec people at a time when companies are investing more in the same space. If only the NSA was more focused on defending our government's systems, we could free up other government resources to work on the non-redundant functions.

One criticism of having a centralized national police force, a common feature in developing countries, is it makes corruption easier and more attractive. In a sense you’ve also centralized corruption and given it just as many efficiencies. That being said I don’t have a full solution to this issue, just a quick point from the other side.

EDIT: I think a while ago (2-3 years maybe) it came out that the EPA had their own SWAT team, which seemed pretty funny.

Apart from the US, what industrialised countries don't have a centralized national police force?

Australia, for one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_Australia

Italy, for historical reasons, has two major and mostly overlapping police forces, plus another two specialized one:

* The "Carabinieri", a branch of the military which historically which mostly works against normal crime

* The "Polizia di Stato", which became a fully civil force in 1981 and often compete with the Carabinieri

* The smaller "Guardia di Finanza", which is another militarized force but at the direct dependence of the Ministry of Economy, and deal with financial crime and smuggling

Until last year, we also had the State Forestry Corp which was its own corp and was, against many many resistances, absorbed into the Carabinieri.

The French have their national Police and also 'Gendarmes' which are like police, but I think a branch of the Armed forces.

I'm not so sure of the history, but it's not so crazy that there are 'two' so long as roles are clear etc..

Nation states are funny things. They change slowly :)

One thing is for certain: there should be more control over who gets to be a 'cop' and the training and ultimate badge authority should be centralized at least at the state level.

This idea of 'Universities' hiring their own cops ... with authority to arrest ... who is in charge of them exactly?

I mean, in France they have 'two systems' but as far as I remember that covers everything and there are only 2 kinds of police uniforms that I ever saw. If there is one goofball cop/gendarme, his case will go pretty high up. Not to the 'dean' of the local college or whatever. Or to 'an elected guy' from some village.

Gendarmerie is indeed part of the military in France. You mainly see them in rural areas/villages while regular cops are found in urban areas. When national service was still compulsory, young people could even choose to do it as a gendarme.

University cops, assuming we are talking about those that are actual police departments, are authorized by their respective states to perform that duty. It operates similarly to any other police department, which means they have the rights and responsibilities of any other police officer. In my state, they are also required to have a public oversight committee with elected representatives, and I assume this is not uncommon in other states.

In most, and perhaps all, states, there are state-level commissions to handle cases of problem cops. However, I will be the first to admit that they don't always work as intended.

They do also have their own kangaroo courts that lack due process for some unexplained reason though: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

I'm not sure there's going to ever be a good happy ground on sexual assault cases that'll please everyone, just due to the nature of the crime. Ultimately a lot of the cases are going to boil down to a he said she said even with evidence that something actually happened. Given all that though there were definitely big issues with how cases were handled before though, as a reaction there's been perhaps an over correction.

Germany. The "regular" police is federalized to the state level. The former border force (Bundesgrenzschutz) is now called Bundespolizei but is still mostly border force, protects the federal government, the railways and air infrastructure. The Customs office (Zoll) is also a police on the federal level, responsible for customs (of course) but also federal taxes and illegal employment. Then there ist the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt), which is the central criminal police but each state also has their own. We also have the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz) but they are the domestic secret service and of course every state has its own domestic secret service...

The municipalities have, depending on the state they are in, forces they call police or "police office" but they are for code enforcement, public health and security, etc.

There is also a military police (Feldjäger) but they don't play a role in day to day life.

We also have the "Polizei im Bundestag", which is the police force for parliament. (It has a good reason to be separate: it's not under control of the government, but of the president of parliament)

The German constitution set forth that law enforcement is a matter of the states; no federal "general purpose" police may exist. Secret agencies and police may not be mixed (although some commenters liken the excessive powers of the Bundeskriminalamt to a secret police), for obvious reasons. Many other western countries don't have that separation in the first place; e.g. the FBI is quite clearly a secret police.

Poland has Central Anticorruption Bureau (CBA) and Internal Security Agency (ABW). They both report to Prime Minister, while Police reports to Ministry of Interior and Administration).

Portugal:

+ normal police (immediate events such as car accidents, small burglars)

+ legal police (white-collar events such as economic crimes, bribes, traficking)

+ military police (acting as normal police on remote/wide field regions)

+ townhall police (events such as stadium security, car tickets)

+ secret police (mostly to identify society risks before they become problems)

+ military (in case of war/calamity they replace have precedence on all above)

This decentralization works OK. When the agents investigating a specific crime are suspected to be corrupt, at some point you see another agency taking forward the investigation and exposing the dirt. A recent case was the investigation about the criminal fires going in Portugal last summer. The military police was suspected of closing their eyes on the incident where +60 people died and the legal police took the case away from them.

Well, bit of egg in your face, pretty much all of them by the look of it.

The UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_law_enforcement_agenci...

Yes, the UK has regional policing. Up here in Scotland we recently restructured to a "national" force, which was supposed to offer efficiency savings but has not been popular with the public. Crime is slowly falling but I believe that's more due to social factors.

(I do think a lot of US police forces would benefit from a RUC -> PSNI style reconstruction)

India. Law and order is State responsibility. There are central agencies but they get involved only at state's request

We have to distinguish here between a single, centralised police force that handles all levels of policing across the country (which is what most commenters replying to your comment seem to be debunking), and having a single, centralised "federal police" force that handles most law enforcement for a single layer of government (which is what I suspect you're getting at).

The US is particularly unique in that even amongst countries with relatively decentralised law enforcement, I can't think of another country where most major government departments have their own internal police force ("why is the Department of Education buying shotguns") or so many "primary" federal law enforcement agencies (FBI/DEA/ATF, etc) which would normally be much more consolidated.

The Irish police force is centralised, and thankfully unarmed. They are generally oafs who have no insight or intelligence. You basically can only before uni/college, so no degree expected ever, and they are known for general uselessness and inaccuracy. This is basically the tip of the iceberg: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/10/head-of-irish-...

I'll agree that the Gardai have many problems but "generally oafs eho have no insight or intelligence" is very very unfair. I know a number of them personally and I would certainly not describe the average Garda like that.

Maybe I am being a bit harsh on them, but I can't say I've had a good experience with them or that they are good at projecting a positive image. Numerous times I had my house burgled or bicycle stolen and they were so damn listless about the whole affair, they literally took a out a ledger and wrote a description of the bicycle long hand. It's 2017 not 1917. They are stuck in the past and don't really seem to do their job to the level that is necessary. Their aversion to technology would be funny if they weren't a police force.

They also seem to have a big chip on their shoulder when it comes to law breakers, they take everything personally and in their indignation often do the paperwork wrong. I have a few stories that are shocking, but to protect parties I won't recall them here.

I think the barriers to people with skills joining the force and enriching it with fresh blood are what is preserving it's holier-than-thou attitude to technology and the future while cementing their dumb and archaic process.

I think they could learn a lot from the PSNI, they've being around less than 20 years and seem to be a far more effective and modern organisation.

The bar was pretty low to enter the Gardai https://i.redd.it/fmlp8q1dwiiz.jpg

Yes. As a taxpayer I am totally ok with a byzantine structure of agencies, any one of which can go after a variety of criminal wrongdoing. Efficiency is much lower on my list of concerns than concentration of power. If an ambitious DA or US Attorney or enforcement agency head can all take action on a given crime, odds go up that somebody will.

Centralization of police makes them less susceptible to corruption, not more. It is even an argument for centralization as it makes bribing both more expensive and less likely by preventing localized buddy-buddy behaviour.

I'd argue that it makes certain types of corruption more/less likely, and that what really matters, either way, is the strength of your institutional safeguards - which means being highly centralised can be a force multiplier in either a good way or a bad way depending on those safeguards.

Funny you bring up the EPA SWAT team. I was reading an article the other day about how the EPA Director had to bring in agents from the field to add additional agents to his security detail [1]. I guess I never thought of EPA agents as providing "security" or being trained to provide protection for officials.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/at-ep...

On a National Police: Making one would require a large restructuring of our government, likely a constitutional convention. The reason is that guys like the FBI and ATF can only go after federal crimes which are de facto felonies and not misdemeanors (I may be totally wrong there, so please correct me). As such, the large majority of crimes are then under the states, as they do the day to day crime stuff, things like fraud, jay-walking, etc. Again, this is the US, so things are very convoluted and I may be wrong. To get a National Police, you'd have to give those rights to the Feds and not just the States, a very messy business that may result in successions. In addition, there are 300+ million Americans, so trying to impose 'law' on a Federal level and not in a State-resolution level would be crazy, as what works in Maine and what should be legal there is not something that may work in Arizona or Hawaii.

To be clear, my vision of a "national police force" is to unify the existing law enforcement agencies which are already enforcing US federal law. I do not want and did not mean to suggest that US police forces _replace_ local police (thereby the US federal government would then need to enforce all local laws, including traffic citations and misdemeanors).

I can see how the discussion would diverge from what I envisioned due to the ambiguous nature of how I described it.

I'm not sure if hiring the best InfoSec people is the way they will be going. They are very clear that their goal is to protect 'retail investors,' not to improve security. To me, that says 'put as many security researchers revealing the flaws in the systems used by large companies in prisons as possible.' Maybe put some kids running nmap on the NASDAQ website in jail.

Nazis wore Hugo Boss. As for branding, the TSA has nothing on that. The TSA recruits on pizza boxes.

Striking imagery is too gauche; a policy of deliberate ambiguity is always preferable, and something it seems the public unconscious (yours truly likely included) very rapidly absorbs.

Your username indicates your bias!

On a more serious note, uniforms are so much more drab today. I do wonder if there's some psychological science behind the mundanity of dress uniforms.

I don't suppose you're up on your psychology? I tried Google and can only find the psych behind uniforms, and their effect on others, but no references to why they aren't as extravagant as they used to be.

modern ideology is both being encouraged to enjoy wherever you go, but also to recoil in cynicism from anyone who appears to actually enjoying to excess.

Neither does your average joe want to put on a garish and fearsome uniform, for fear of being perceived as really believing in their duty-in-uniform ("it's just my job, I'm just like you"), nor does your average joe want there to be much difference in how they fear the average TSA agent than they already do their Starbucks barista :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9ZWEZNcKsc

I'm pretty old and, as such, I feel inclined to give tradition a nod. There's something to be said for a good dress uniform.

I'd never go so far as to suggest we need more people like Gaddafi. No, that would be morally wrong of me to suggest so. By most accounts, he was a horrible man.

But...

That man could wear a uniform. He had enough medals on his uniform to claim the top pedestal at the Special Olympics. He was a man who understood the value of a fancy dress uniform.

And, back on that same topic, I've done way too much reading now. As near as I can tell, nobody has decided why dress uniforms have become more tame. They don't even usually wear fancy hats, with some exceptions. The Swiss and Britons still have some fancy hats.

I really do wonder why the uniforms aren't nearly as fancy as they used to be. I can understand utilitarian needs, but these are dress uniforms. It's not like they are going to be out in a fancy dress ghillie suit.

I bet there's a reason for it and I'd not be surprised if it were related to something psychological. A layman's guess would be that really snazzy uniforms inspire fear and promote ideas of inequality, or a lack of feelings of shared pain and shared service. Which is probably why Gaddafi could get away with it, but Trump can not.

I have spent way too long pondering this and looking for scholarly studies at Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com