Massachusetts was the second state to create a law enforcement agency. Usually state law enforcement agencies are organized after one of two models. The first of which is a centralized model, where the tasks of major criminal investigations are combined with the patrol of state highways. Centralized state police agencies usually do the following: assist local law enforcement departments in criminal investigations when asked, operate centralized identification bureaus, maintain centralized criminal records repository, patrol state highways, and provide select training for municipal and county officers. The Pennsylvania state police was the first modern force to combine these duties and has been called “the first modern state police agency”. Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, and Delaware are a few of the states that patterned their state level enforcement activities after the Pennsylvania model.
The second state model, the decentralized model, characterizes operations in the southern United States, but is found in the Midwest and in some western states as well. The model draws two functions; highway patrol and other state level law enforcement functions. North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia are a few of many states that employ both functions of this model.
Local agencies, including city and county agencies, represent the third level of law enforcement activity of the United States. The nation’s largest law enforcement agency, the New York Police Department, has about forty-five thousand full time employees, including about thirty-eight thousand sworn-in officers. A sworn-in officer is a law enforcement officer who is trained and empowered to perform full police duties, such as making arrests, conducting investigations, and carrying firearms. There are approximately twelve thousand municipal police departments and three thousand one hundred sheriff departments in the United States.
A Municipal Police Department is a city or town based law enforcement agency. Every incorporated municipality in the United States has the authority to create its own police force. Most really small towns hire only one officer who fills the role of chief, investigator, and night watch, as well as everything else. City police chiefs are normally appointed by the mayor or selected by the city council.
Private Protective services are an independent or proprietary commercial organization that provides protective services to employers on a contractual basis. The counterterrorist potential of local police is partly a function of numbers. More than seven hundred thousand local law enforcement officers work in the continental U.S. compared with just twelve thousand FBI agents. Based on numbers alone, local law enforcement personnel are much more likely than feds to cross paths with terrorists. Local police officers have an everyday presence in the communities that they are sworn to protect. They "walk the beat," communicate regularly with local residents and business owners, and are more likely to notice even subtle changes in the neighborhoods that they patrol.
Private security services have been defined as those self employed individuals and privately funded business entities and organizations providing security related services to specific clientele for a fee, the individual entity that retains or employs them, or for themselves in order to protect their persons, private property, or interests from various hazards.
The presence of police in our communities sensitizes them to anomalies and yields counterterrorist data valuable to other agencies. "Only an effective local police establishment that has the confidence of citizens," former CIA director James Woolsey testified to Congress in 2004, "is going to be likely to hear from, say, a local merchant in a part of town containing a number of new immigrants that a group of young men from abroad have recently moved into a nearby apartment and are acting suspiciously. Local police are best equipped to understand how to protect citizens' liberties and obtain such leads legally." Distilling this view of the local police role in counterterrorism, Manhattan Institute senior fellow R. P. Eddy has christened them our "first preventers”.
Private security agencies and local agencies should not be able to have roles in gathering intelligence unless it pertains to a certain matter. If there is no probable cause or reason for them to investigate then they should not be able to go in and try to find intelligence where there isn’t any intelligence to find.
The three levels of law; the FBI, local, and state law enforcement agencies all play a big role in making sure laws are not broken. One of the main roles of the FBI is counter terrorism. The main things that make up local and state law agencies are patrolling and highway safety. They take care of everything that is not on a federal scale. Without this law enforcement system, the United States today wouldn’t be as safe, and would be completely different than the country as we know it.
Schmalleger, Frank. Criminal Justice Today. Tenth . Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. Print. Pg.161
"Manhattan Institute for Policy Research." Civic Bulletin. sept 2006. MI, Web. 25 Oct 2009. <http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cb_43.htm>.