3 Tiny Federal Law Enforcement Agencies You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
We’ve all heard of the FBI, the NSA, the CIA and those big guys. Hell, most of you will even have heard of NCIS by now, what with the big-budget TV shows and all. But if you thought that they were the only federal law enforcement agencies you might have to deal with some day, you’re mistaken. The US is riddled with federal law enforcement agencies, ranging from the massive ones (the FBI has over 35,000 employees) through the medium sized agencies with “only” a few thousand employees, to the tiny, almost cute ones we’re going to tell you about today. We’ll just go ahead, don’t you think?
3: The Supreme Court Police
Weighing in at 145 sworn members, this one is almost in a class of its own. However, in that tiny force, the powers that be have managed to create K9 units, HazMat/bomb squads, honor guards, uniformed divisions, protective services and even a bunch of paper-pushers. Well done.
The Supreme Court Police is just what it sounds like – they’re there to protect the property of the US Supreme Court, the judges, the visitors and the employees. Nothing else. But make no mistake – if you fail to turn in your case relevant documents on 6.125? x 9.25? paper and bound in a booklet, they’ll probably throw you in jail. Oh, and we won’t mention what might happen if you use the wrong paper thickness…
Oh, and remember that these guys are trained at the FLETC, so you probably shouldn’t mess with’em…
2: National Institutes of Health Police
Right… this is a weird bunch.
The Division of Police (DP) has been granted jurisdictional ability only within the NIH Bethesda Campus and at Rocky Mountain Laboratory (RML) in Montana. Other NIH facilities, such as the North Carolina facility, Executive Boulevard, and other “off-campus “ facilities are not under the jurisdiction of the NIH Division of Police. This means that all emergency or activities occurring on the Bethesda or RML sites requiring police intervention will receive response from Division of Police staff and specialists. All other NIH facilities need to contact or deal directly with local authorities.
That’s…not so impressive. But wait! They have intelligence gathering capabilities… but apparently, it’s only one guy. And he looks kinda old. In addition to this, they have traffic control and police the parking lots.
On second thought, you probably don’t need to worry about encountering these guys. We couldn’t even find out how many of them there are, but they apparently have 15 dogs. So that’s nice.
1: The Hoover Dam Police
Look, it makes sense that someone should be guarding a thing like the Hoover Dam. It’s huge, it’s got a lot of people both depending on it being there, and a lot of people depending on it not falling down. The Hoover Dam police makes sure no one gets up to any shenanigans in their 22 square mile security zone, and we couldn’t figure out how many of them there are, but they spend a lot of their time riding around on bikes, apparently.
Oh…err… we probably shouldn’t mess too much with them – after all, these are the guys who guard the Sector 7 stash where they put the really, really bad thing…
Next time, we thought we might talk about the Mint Police – you know, the guys who make sure you don’t dip into that After Eight box before the time is right. It’s a serious job; those things have really taken off over the last few years.
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all three are FLETC trained and perform full police functions. locals would not bear well at some of the facs because of the lack of knowledge of what actually occurs at these facs.