American local government is unlike any other system I know. The most insane thing is police departments - each County has a completely independent police depar

American local government is unlike any other system I know. The most insane thing is police departments - each County has a completely independent police department, within a county each city will have their own police department, even many universities have police department of their own! Within ten miles of my house I think there are 8 police jurisdictions. Besides the silly amount of overhead introduced by having tiny "cities" with police departments making up several percent of their population (https://www.nj.com/news/2017/12/new_jersey_smallest_towns_with_their_own_police_de.html https://www.nj.com/news/2017/12/new_jersey_smallest_towns_wi...) this introduces obvious difficulties of coordination and communication - a few years ago there was a serial rapist who spread his crimes over multiple police jurisdictions so nobody identified the pattern until, by complete coincidence, a husband and wife who worked in different police departments talked to each other about a case she was working on. https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/17/netflix-unbelievable-colorado-detective-stacy-galbraith/ https://www.denverpost.com/2019/09/17/netflix-unbelievable-c... Next you have school districts, which are approximately 90% designed in order to segregate black kids from white kids, and the other 10% of justification is a race-blind desire to not pay for other kids to go to school, just your own. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/27/16004084/school-segregation-evolution https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/27/16004084/s...