Coming back from the pool tonight, I noticed about half a dozen police cars parked alongside Oakland Technical High School. They bore shields saying, "Oakland School Police". I asked a policeman if this meant that the school itself had a police force. He said that they look after the 200-odd schools in the district. If someone is speeding along the street beside a school they handle that; if someone's selling drugs across the road from a school they handle that. I figured it was like having a traffic section or Armed Robbery Squad, or, as they used to have in Victoria (dunno about NSW): the Consorting Squad.
I was curious because this is a familiar country to me in many ways (and I realised the other day that it is familiar to me from teaching the children of US defense personnel in Alice Springs in the early 80s), but it is subdivided differently. There doesn't seem to be a California Police, as you'd have NSW Police in Australia. There are Oakland Police and Piedmont Police in the next city, etc...In general, there is much more local governance it seems. This makes sense given that the society is so differentiated, I suppose. But perhaps that makes it harder to find comprehensive solutions to problems.
And on reflection I realise it may not be so strange to have a school squad. Travelling on the bus to downtown Oakland at 'home time' yesterday, we were taken aback by the school kid banter. On the Glebe Point Road bus they might talk about appearance and crushes; here they were discussing who got shot!
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