In message <
qn95n8913llq0449v...@4ax.com>, at 15:45:01 on
>The events this week in Boston were, thank goodness, highly unusual.
>Even so I presume that six forces were not running six separate
>investigations independent of each other but there was some
>co-ordination which meant in effect that all efforts were co-opted
>into the the work of just one overall controller.
Given that several were present at (or gave their apologies to) the
press conferences, it wasn't at all clear who was in charge. Although
the State Police had the most voluble spokesperson.
For whatever reason, Homeland Security seemed to be very much in the
background.
>I was looking at it from the user perspective. Suppose I have my
>cellphone stolen on the MIT campus. If I go to the City Police or the
>FBI about it, do they have a channel through which they cooperate with
>the MIT police or do they say 'sorry, that's not us - go and talk to
>the university police about your problem? If the former then, yes, I'd
>say there were layers. If the latter, I'd say from the user
>perspective they are separate.
You can't go to the FBI unless it's a case which triggers their
threshold, broadly speaking being a "Federal Crime", which stealing a
cellphone usually isn't. In this case I think they were instructed to
act by the President.
But I have to admit I'm not clear when crimes in the USA get escalated
from 'campus'[1] to the County/City or the State.
I don't think the State police only concern themselves with things which
happen outside of a County/City because all of the State is usually
either in one or the other.
[1] On reflection, we do have 'campus police' in the UK. The Oxford
University Police (aka Bulldogs) were disbanded in 2003, but the
Cambridge ones seem to be still operating:
http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/proctors/constabulary/
--
Roland Perry