Issue 259 Too many Federal cops January 28, 2013

Have you noticed in the Federal government’s alphabet soup of agencies and departments, most of them are law officers? ATF, DEA, FBI, NSA, CIA, U.S. Marshals, ICE, TSA, and the list keeps going. We even have swat teams in both the EPA and the Department of Education. Is this a little ridiculous?

Overlap: For one, many of these police forces have overlapping responsibilities. ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire arms) deals with drugs, guns, and illegal selling of liqueur. But many States have police forces doing that exact same job. DEA (drug enforcement agency) plays a similar role in the battle against illegal drugs. But the FBI, ATF and TSA along with local police also deal with those same groups of criminals. Why all the overlap you ask? Simple, government has had one key problem that has always existed. That problem is where one group or agency seeks to gather as much power as possible to do all the jobs of the other groups. At that point it makes that particular agency more important than the others and thus money and power get concentrated in that agency. Other agencies see this and thus begin to do the same thing. Needless to say it wastes taxpayer money significantly.

What to cut and merge: In my opinion, the EPA, department of Education should not have any special police forces. In fact, no agency should have a police force with the exception of the FBI. This gives the FBI complete control over Federal law enforcement responsibilities. So if the EPA wants to use a SWAT team on "something" or some one (who knows why they need a SWAT team in the first place), they must go to the FBI. At this point, the FBI would justify if the act warrants the use of Federal law enforcement or if it would be better handled by local police or a lawyer. This hopefully would reduce the amount of unnecessary raids like those conducted by the DEA or ATF on people for "nickel bags" of weed or false reports of guns in the home of an individual. Also, intelligence agencies like the NSA, CIA and others should be merged as well. They already act as data hubs for information and work in the service of the country to protect us. Therefore combining them makes sense (especially as they did not share information with each other which could have stopped 9/11). In the end, only two key police agencies would exist, the FBI and a new form of the central intelligence agency. Likewise, we can just be rid of certain federal law enforcement that has no business existing (in this case, in instances where local police are better able to carry out the same task). Guarding our boarder can be done by the National Guard services which would probably be a more effective deterrent to cartels trying to sneak over the boarder. But this is all just an idea. However I believe you my dear reader get the point. We are wasting money doing things that are either better handled by local cops or merging groups together to get the job done more efficiently and effectively.

Conclusion: When did the federal government become so police oriented that we became the democratic equivalent of a police state. With all these laws on the books (many are either unenforceable or even not needed) it is no wonder we have all these police just trying to enforce these so called "laws". The old adage is too much is no good. You know what, if America keeps up this pace, America will stop being good.