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Police Consolidation: The End of Local Law Enforcement?
Written by  Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.


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Police Consolidation: The End of Local Law Enforcement?
From Bergen, New Jersey, to St. Louis, Missouri, to Salt Lake City, Utah, the merging of law enforcement moves along, applauded by a coterie of city leaders and well-meaning citizens.

Nationwide, towns and cities are jumping on the consolidation bandwagon. According to the latest data, there are about 18,000 state and local law-enforcement agencies in the United States. Of those, more than 150 have undergone some level of consolidation.

Those pushing for the consolidation of police forces into regional or metropolitan agencies typically cite budget shortfalls as the best reason for closing down local forces and combining resources to form a consolidated force.

Typically, the austerity argument goes like this: If Town A spends $1 million on police services, Town B spends $1 million, and Town C spends $2 million, wouldn’t it make more sense to streamline those services by creating a combined force that is smaller and costs less?

Sounds good, but the hypothetical doesn’t live up to the hype. Take the story of Louisville, Kentucky, for example. Beginning with a referendum in 2000, city administrators began singing the cost-saving serenade, and on January 6, 2003 city police merged with the unincorporated areas of Jefferson County. After reassigning the responsibilities and reassessing needs, the number of patrol divisions was reduced from 10 to eight, and the number of beats fell from 51 to 44. Additionally, key management positions in the new department were taken from officers and given to newly hired civilian employees.

Those numbers would seem to prove the fulfillment of the money-saving promises made by the consolidation cheerleaders. Sadly, the ledger tells a different story.

According to Steve Conrad, current chief of the Glendale, Arizona, police and former assistant chief of police in Louisville, the savings they were promised never materialized. At a conference on police consolidation held in 2011 at Michigan State University, Conrad recalled that although the metro mayor touted “the synergy of merger: ten people here, ten people there, they could work more efficiently together,” the department actually ended up hiring “15 or 20 here, and 15 or 20 there.”

In fact, the merger was a budgetary disaster. Conrad estimated that consolidation cost about $85 million. New communication equipment cost nearly $70 million and allowances for new healthcare plans and other benefits ended up costing another $10 million. Hardly a windfall.

The consolidation math doesn’t add up, but the harsh economic realities don’t appear until years after the consolidation is bought and paid for — literally.

That isn’t to say every consolidation will be as big a boondoggle as Louisville. Certainly there will be cases when the consolidation saved money in the long run, but these cases will be few and far between. Everything will cost more than promised, but local governments will have already surrendered their control over the costs of contracts made for the outfitting of a force.

Another fiscal fact is that upfront costs are usually prohibitive. It doesn’t take a CPA to realize that for the one-time cost of new branding, new uniforms, new vehicles, new training manuals, etc., a town could pay for its own police force for years.

Often, in support of their plans for consolidation, politicians will point out that smalltown budgets prevent them from fully staffing a police department and from providing citizens with the services of specialty units like SWAT or K-9.

This might be true. A more relevant question needs to be asked in response, however: How many of the crimes committed within the jurisdiction of a local police force require the participation of one of those specialized units? Very few.

Furthermore, if such a crime is committed, what prevents the local police chief from calling his colleague from a larger nearby jurisdiction and asking for the assistance of this bigger town’s SWAT team?

Besides, there is the competing concept of ad hoc consolidation. Under this theory, several local police forces combine resources long enough to train a select number of officers from each department to serve on a SWAT team or bomb squad who are deployed only when an extraordinary situation arises in one of the participating jurisdictions. This way, chiefs cede no power to politicians or bureaucrats, townspeople save money by not having to pay to staff and train their own specialized unit, and on those rare occasions when they are needed, a specialized unit will be available.

Law Enforcement as a Business

Even if consolidation did lower costs, there are other considerations more important than money.

The story of the transformation of law enforcement in Salt Lake County to one “unified” police force illustrates some of the harmful consequences of consolidation.

In a widely reprinted article entitled “The Sheriff Who Sold His County,” Clint Richardson recounts the “evolution” of law enforcement in this Western ski haven. According to Richardson, on January 1, 2010, Salt Lake County “became a police state” when the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department was officially dissolved and in its place a corporation took over all law-enforcement duties. The private company that was given control of police functions is called the “Unified Police Department of Greater Salt Lake” (UPD).

First, the UPD became the “new police force” for all of the cities and unincorporated area within Salt Lake County. As Richardson says, this abolished “the only true lawful protective body within the county, the elected Sheriff’s ‘Department.’”

At the time of the consolidation, a report published by the county mayor declared that the man the people elected as sheriff, Jim Winder, was appointed by the County Council to be the chief executive officer (CEO) of the UPD, a private company that would be handling the county’s crime prevention duties and running the “day-to-day police operations.”

This reassignment and relabeling seems to turn the man who was once the duly elected sheriff into an unelected personal commissar of the politicians who run the county.

All concerned police chiefs nationwide, proud of their noble profession and their responsibility to protect and serve their fellow citizens, who are facing the hard press from local politicians to cooperate with the move toward consolidation, should learn from Salt Lake County.

Without simplifying the situation too much, the plain fact is that a business now runs law enforcement in Salt Lake County. Local police chiefs, if they still exist, no longer have any control over policy or procedure. In Salt Lake County, control right now belongs to an unelected and unaccountable board of directors that is driven not by a zeal for the fighting of crime or the well-being of officers, but by an obligation to mind the bottom line and keep the profit margin wide.

For their part, the people can’t turn to a man who lives in the community and benefits from the protection and safety he maintains. Police chiefs and the public will have their control, their autonomy, and their dignity co-opted by a corporation.

In the case of Salt Lake County, Clint Richardson ably sums up the sad situation:

A corporation is always designed to make a profit, even in a so-called non-profit structure. Therefore the Sheriff, as CEO of the UPD Corporation, has been catapulted into a position that now directly conflicts with the lawful purposes for which the voters elected him into office. As the corporate president of this police corporation, he must ensure a profit is made for the company. Therefore, the people of the county will suffer the consequences of their Sheriffs [sic] conflict of interest.

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Illegal Police Department Activity Threaten to Bankrupt Counties Nationwide

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 8:09
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(Before It's News)

The Truth Behind The News

susanne_posel_news_ police-state-002Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
February 7, 2013


Local police departments (LPDs) across the nation are incorporated as specialized non-profits. Most LPDs are known to the Secretary of State in their respective state as an association which gives the impression to the average citizen that this is a union. However this is not the case.

The LPDs are contracted by the City Council to preform police services and securitize the city they are hired in. This is the exchange of a local government hiring a private security firm to stabilize the local population and generate revenue for the city through tickets, arrests and recording infractions. However, this does not include upholding local laws, as the County Sheriff’s Office is elected to take charge of.

The problem with this system is that the LPDs, being corporations, are subject to corporate law. And corporations fall into dissolution (i.e. the termination of the corporation) for various reasons quite often. When it is the LPD that dissolves; this becomes a question of legal authority over the citizens by the hired private security firm known as the LPD.

Corporations that dissolve are not allowed by law to conduct business. These same rules apply to the LPD that is actually a corporation hired by the local government or city council to preform police services.

For example, in the State of Oregon, over 12 LPDs are in dissolution. On the Secretary of State website, when a LPD is dissolved it is classified as “INA” or inactive. This includes LPDs in the following cities:

• Beaverton
• Canby
• Charleston
• Eugene
• Gresham
• King County
• Lake Oswego
• Lebanon
• Portland
• Sherwood
• Weston

According to corporate law, if a corporation dissolves, it must withdraw as a business entity. This means that once the LPD is dissolved, they cannot continue to perform police services for the city in which they were hired.

And in fact, should this be brought to the public, it might be common place (as it is in the State of Oregon) that LPDs are in dissolution and not legally allowed to conduct police services because they lack legal authority as a dissolved corporation.

It also stands that the local governments that are privy to this information would be involved in not only egregious corruption but are knowingly misleading the citizens of their towns and cities. Once the LPD is dissolved, from the date of dissolution, any arrest, ticket, or police service preformed is now an illegal act. It is tantamount to a citizen impersonating a police officer which as serious legal ramifications.

Should citizens become aware of this fact in their city – that their LPD is a corporation that has dissolved and is continuing to operate as if they have legal right to do so – there would be justified legal recourse for every citizen who had been arrested, jailed, forced to pay a ticket of any kind and forced to appear in municipal court under those circumstances (including court costs, attorney’s fees and fees attributed by the court).

In 2012, Louis F. Quijas, Assistant Secretary of the Office for State and Local Law Enforcement (OSLLE), for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) explained the purpose of the OSLLE as a front “office that provided coordination and partnership with state, local, and tribal law enforcement.”

The OSLLE was recommended by the 9/11 Commission. It was created to “lead the coordination of DHS-wide policies relating to state, local, and tribal law enforcement’s role in preventing acts of terrorism and to serve as the primary liaison between non-Federal law enforcement agencies across the country and the Department.”

Intelligence is disseminated through OSLLE to LPDs or “non-Federal law enforcement partners” to keep information flowing through initiatives such as the “If You See Something, Say Something™”, the Blue Campaign, the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative (NSI), and the Department’s efforts in Countering Violent Extremism.

OSLLE consistently works with LPDs on education, actionable information, operations and intelligence for the purpose of their part in the operations of the DHS with regard to keeping “our homeland safe”.

OSLLE also works as a liaison between LPDs to maintain DHS leadership and considerations of “issues, concerns, and requirements of state, local, and tribal law enforcement during budget, grant, and policy development processes.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) upholds relationships with LPDs for the purposes of and participation with National Preparedness Grant Program that began this year.

To ensure that local police departments continue to meet the requirements of training from DHS, officers regularly attend the DHS Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia.

LPDs are focused through OSLLE and DHS to “remain vigilant and to protect our communities from all threats, whether terrorism or other criminal activities” as DHS expands its control over local law enforcement and the communities they oversee.

As stated in the DHS directive from the Office for State and Local Law Enforcement (SLLE), the assistant Secretary for SLLE has “the primary official responsible for leading the coordination of Department-wide policies related to the role of state, tribal, and local law enforcement in preventing, preparing for, protecting against, and responding to natural disasters, acts of terrorism and other man- made disasters within the US.”

This directive also sets guidelines of advocacy for DHS by the LPDs. Authorization of DHS to take over LPDs is given in Title 6 of the United States Code, Section 607, “Terrorism prevention”.

In 2008, the Bureau of Justice Statistics stated that LPD “make up more than two-thirds of the 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies in the US” which translates to an estimated 12,501 law enforcement agencies. Of those LPDs, there are more than 461,000 sworn officers.

Last year President Obama signed an executive order (EO) that created the White House Homeland Security Partnership Council and Steering Committee which tied DHS to local partnerships, federal and private institutions “to address homeland security challenges.”

Members of the Steering Committee include:

• Department of State
• Department of US Treasury
• Department of Defense
• Department of Justice
• Department of Transportation
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• The Federal Bureau of Investigations

In 2011, Congress encouraged private sector “police companies” to replace law enforcement on the State and local level by coercing a new police protection insurance that would tack on a fee to citizens for the use of “police protection”.

This move was justified by having citizens pay for the police to be called to scenes as a “communal service” that is contractual just as any other service or good is paid for. As a customer, the citizen would tell 911 dispatch their insurance information for payment purposes to be billed after the police were deployed to the scene, or services were rendered.

Turning LPDs into private security firms that provide services to the public was the scheme behind privatizing law enforcement.

Under state government contract, private security firms preform law enforcement services. With legislative bodies on both the state and Congressional level supporting this change, private corporations enter into contractual agreements with city councils to provide armed security patrol. Just as a rent-a-cop is hired to secure private property, local police departments are masked rent-a-cops that were hired by local government to secure their city.

This fact has been hidden from public scrutiny and has added to the blending of social perception of what the police are and what they do so that police services are able to function without question. At the same time, citizens are expected to pay fees for these “services” that were once inherent to life in a structured town or city.

In early 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report entitled “Homeland Security and Intelligence: Next Steps in Evolving the Mission” which outlined in part on how to redirect efforts of the federal government from international terrorism toward home-grown terrorists and build a DHS-controlled police force agency that would control all cities and towns through the use of local police departments.

DHS maintains that “the threat grows more localized” which necessitates the militarization of local police in major cities in the US and the training of staff from local agencies to make sure that oversight is restricted to the federal government.

Private corporations have been parading as public servants policing cities and towns across America without the knowledge of the average citizen for quite some time. Although they wear the same badges as LPDs of the past, these private security firms are not there to uphold peace or enforce any laws and city ordinances. Just like any other corporation, they seek out opportunities to collect revenue for the benefit of the city that hired them.