[volkl48]

You can either have separate agencies or you can have a pile of specialized sub-agencies within some umbrella organization.....but working out how to align funding with who it's serving is going to be harder with the umbrella organization in many cases.

Specialization is a thing within policing as much as it is within the rest of life. It's not like the same person who knows how to investigate a murder scene is equally capable of investigating complicated financial crimes on Wall St.

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In terms of aligning incentives, there are various situations where there would otherwise there would be a mismatch of "who pays for this/who's responsibility this is" vs "who this is meant to serve".

On your examples:

Campus PD - College has equal/larger population than town. Town-college relations are often tense at best. Voters in town have no interest in spending their tax money on adequate policing for the college, college has no interest in donating a bunch of money to the PD to maybe get better services that they still have no say in. Students often heavily distrust the local PD and are unlikely to report crimes to them. It's still a problematic structure, but the premise that it would be better without is questionable.

Transit Cops - No individual town or city is going to patrol the system coherently otherwise, and areas which utilize the service less are unlikely to spend significant resources policing it. Services which cross state lines also have jurisdictional issues even with just using normal state-level police.

[cycomanic]

Funny thing is, it works in pretty much any other western country. Now speaking about Germany there's essentially two police arms. The state police and the federal police.

I don't see why every government department needs a police. Yes there are specific crimes that you might want to investigate, but you don't have to have police for that. Look for example to IRS they can have investigators, but they don't need police powers. If they need those they can go to the police.

It's not only that every government department has a police now, it's also that (nearly) every one of them has swat teams, I mean for heavens sake the department of forestry has a swat team!

[MagnumOpus]

I hear you, though, even in Germany there are other separate police forces under different ministries, like the Zoll (customs and immigration), the Feldjaeger (military police), and Justizvollzug (correctional officers and prisoner transport) - and each one of them has SWAT-like teams in addition to the forces of state and federal police.

There are also a lot of other public officers with limited police powers and different reporting, just like in the US - officers of the courts, public health inspectors, the Ordnungsamt (public order office), forest rangers, officers of the bureau of standards etc.

Until a few decades ago, it was even more splintered, and the border police and railway police were only integrated into the federal police in the 1990s if I am not mistaken...

[nkmnz]

Some cities like Frankfurt also started to rename the „Ordnungsamt“ to „Stadtpolizei“ (City Police). Also, we should not forget that we have quite some presence of US military police around US bases like Ramstein, Kaiserslautern and NATO Headquaters.

[lodovic]

In the Netherlands, we have national police, local police, military police, railroad police, forest police, border police, and so on. They are all fairly independent of each other and have separate jurisdictions.

[Tijdreiziger]

The Dutch railroad police (as well as the water, traffic, and aviation police) was sadly disbanded in 2013 [1]. In the same year, all 25 local police forces were disbanded and replaced by one national police force [2].

[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dienst_Spoorwegpolitie#Opgehev...

[2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politie_in_Nederland#Vorming_v...

[BBC-vs-neolibs]

In Sweden, there was until just recently, 21 regional indendepent police, plus a national investigative unit. (And the secret police and the military police.)

Now the 21 regional police have been merged into one national police.