TomC's (and my) objection that while >10k police departments are certainly too much, reducing it to 60 underestimates how big US is.
Los Angeles has a population not much smaller than all of Scotland, and NYC is almost twice the size. NYC has a population bigger than any of Australia's states too.
Which would be a reasonable objection, if there was a maximum staff level above which a police force becomes unmanageable.
But there isn't.
The limiting factor on how large a police department can be is the size of the jurisdiction in which the law remains (at least approximately) constant.
Within a single state, the law is constant throughout, and a single police force is therefore the most efficient model, certainly in the modern world with rapid communications and fast vehicles.
Of course a more populous state needs more police, more police stations, more police vehicles, etc. etc.; But it doesn't need more police
departments.
Bigger police departments are more efficient, can provide better and more consistent training to their officers, are more easily able to afford the latest forensic technology, and are able to ensure that expensive technologies and equipment are less likely to go under-utilised.
Not really. My state, like much of the US, is largely rural, with a couple of large population centers. The terrain is quite varied, from rolling hills, prairie to farmland to forests to lake regions. Some of it is densely populated. Some of it is extremely sparsely populated, remote wilderness. It is not reasonable to expect that police from the nearest large city could be familiar with individuals or situations or terrain in my county. Nor would I expect a police officer from my town or my county to be familiar with the trouble spots in our state capitol, for instance.
Even within my town, speed limits vary, as do traffic conditions, population density, the propensity for wildlife to wander into the road, the number of children, college students, old people, etc. varies wildly by neighborhood. Locals know the best ways to avoid certain traffic pinch points at certain times of the day or to get around a train that's coming through town or alternate routes when there's construction or an accident or it's garbage pick up day or bus pick up/drop off times. And shift changes. Definitely streets/intersections you want to avoid when early shift ends. The county in which I live has everything from a city of about 25000 to mostly rural/very small towns and interstates and highways and....dirt roads that wind up and down steep inclines and heavily wooded areas. Plus, we have winters where all of that gets covered by snow and ice, and the weather can be 20 below (F) so you definitely need to know where you are and where you're going and how to get there. Fast cars do not help.
Police in the larger cities in my state often are called upon to administer Narcan. I would be surprised if that is something officers in my town ever do or are trained to do.
So what? That doesn't imply that they have to have different paymasters or managers. One police department is more than capable of having hundreds (or even thousands) of police stations or precincts, each with its own specialisations and locally relevant skills.
I just did some googling and discovered that the population of Queensland Au is 5.185M and has 12,000 police officers, meaning that there is one police officer for every 432 citizens. That's more than twice the number of officers/citizen in my town. My state has a population slightly over that of Queensland and only about 11,000 police officers.
And those police cover everyone in the state, from the urban and suburban areas of Brisbane, a city of 2.6 million residents in a region with 3.8 million inhabitants, through to the very sparsely populated areas of the North and West, to the mining towns, to the port cities such as Townsville, and the tourist hubs like Cairns.
Each has its own police requirements; All are policed by the one Queensland Police Service.
So the taxpayers of Queensland pay only for one police academy, one police HR department, one police payroll department, one procurement department (which can get bulk discounts on all the equipment, uniforms, vehicles, etc., etc.), one set of senior officers and managers, one forensics department, one police dog training facility ...
What benefit would accrue if the Mount Isa police (for example) had to either have their own version of all of these things, or do without them, or go cap-in-hand begging the Brisbane Police to allow them to use the big city facilities?
How would that be better for anyone in Queensland?
