I'm not sure why you posted on Flame, since only the ref at the end to A Clockwork Orange sounds anything less than sober serious.

I've had lots of reason lately to think about how the police work in this country, and I've come to the conclusion that municipal police forces are a bad idea. Time and again lately reporters have turned over rocks and found municipal PDs in an incestuous relationship with the city government to use the police to farm the citizens for revenue. We've seen little podunk towns end up with multiple competing entrepreneurial police agencies each trying to maximize profit. In Chicago Emmanuel may take a fall for his collusion with Chicago PD to cover up abuse.

The common thread seems to be cities owning and operating police forces. The idea of a municipal police force is relatively new, dating from the early 1800s in London. The much older tradition is that of the sheriff, an individual empowered to enforce the law over an entire region. In America that means a county--all our sheriffs are county sheriffs.

One further observation: I live in a filled-in suburban sprawl that's a county divided into municipal sections. There's no rural land separating cities. This is becoming the standard urban environment in America.

So: Disband the municipal police forces and transfer all the employees to the sheriff. This will efficiently centralize the police infrastructure over a wide region, yielding benefits such as integrated communication and dispatching, central bulk purchasing, and so on.

I'd divide the force roughly into 1/3-2/3 parts. 2/3 of that force would be available to be assigned permanently to neighborhoods. Each block would have its own cop. After closing down and selling off the police stations, the sheriff could buy houses in the neighborhoods where the block cop could live as one of the perks of employment. Or if the economics don't work for the sheriff to buy the housing, neighborhoods with the resources might provide housing for their cop.

The neighborhoods would get to choose their cop from the available pool, holding interviews and getting the final say. The cop would stick around, get to know people, become a member of that small community. Most important, that individual would be answerable to his or her neighbors. He'd have to face them every day, and the day after a bout of bad judgment will be hell for a miscreant cop.

That other third I set aside would be used for things like patrolling major streets and highways, the usual office scutwork of a police agency, and to act as a reserve force when needed.

I don't think this would be a panacea, because a cop having a personal relationship with a community can be a two-edged sword. Accountability's great, but a personal relationship might also lead to favoritism and corruption. But I can't help but wonder whether it might make things better in America, especially for the minority communities who seem to have the most problems with their (usually white) police forces, to tilt the balance that far in favor of local control and accountability.

Or am I full of shit? That's one advantage of posting on Flame, talking that way, right?