Site Specific Police

Major government installations (bases, national monuments, government buildings like the Capital, the White House, etc.) and large infrastructural complexes (airports, seaports, major parks, etc.) should be allowed to have special police forces for those specific areas to augment the regular police forces of that political jurisdiction. These special police forces would be given the same basic training as the regular general police in that jurisdiction and would have the same comprehensive police authority in those areas, just like the regular police forces would continue to have. They would be able to arrest anyone, give ticket for anything they want, and do anything the regular police forces could do.  However, they may undergo some additional special training to prepare them for the specialized nature of policing around their assigned site.  There should be no specific delimiting boundary within which these police forces could operate but they would merely be operating generally within and around their assigned sites.

Special Police

The number of special forces with the authority to carry firearms, execute warrants, and make arrests should be very limited.  Over the past few decades, too many agencies have been armed with this authority, contributing to an unacceptable rate of erroneous threats, raids and arrests. Inexperience, underdeveloped enforcement policies, and attitudes that often give rise to unjustifiably overzealous or even reckless enforcement methods seem to be more common within civil agencies who have been given these powers than within agencies which have traditionally been responsible for criminal enforcement, such as the FBI.

The authority to carry firearms, conduct searches and make arrests should generally fall only to local (city or state) or federal (FBI) law enforcement personnel. Of course, there should be exceptions in which personnel from other agencies should be allowed to carry firearms and make arrests (like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). However, the standard way for agencies to seek enforcement of their various rules and regulations should be to contact the law enforcement elements with such authority (maybe even ride along with them in an observer and informative way), describe the nature of the violation and what people, evidence or information they are seeking.

For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have the power to carry firearms, conduct raids and make arrests. Generally, violations relating to these organizations are civil, not criminal, in nature.  Raids do not need to involve surprise swarms of agents breaking in with weapons drawn.  Usually, this use of overwhelming force is completely unjustifiable and results in resentment and distrust towards the government from the parties that were affected.