History
The Park Watchmen were first recruited in 1791 by George Washington to protect federal property only in the District of Columbia. The Watchmen were given the same powers and duties as the Metropolitan Police of Washington in 1882, and their name was changed to the present U.S. Park Police in 1919. Their authority first began to expand outside D.C. in 1929, and today they are primarily responsible for the Gateway National Recreation Area units within New York City and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, as well as the many designated areas in the Washington area, which includes neighboring counties in Maryland and Virginia. These sites include the National Mall, the C&O Canal towpath in the region, and the parallel roadways of the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia and Clara Barton Parkway in Maryland.
The police functioned as an independent agency of the federal government until 1849, when it was placed under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior. In 1867, Congress transferred the police to the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds, under the supervision of the Chief of Engineers of the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1925, Congress placed the Park Police in the independent Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital. Headed by an Army officer, Lt. Col. Ulysses S. Grant III, the office reported directly to the President of the United States. In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt transferred the police to the National Park Service.
Today they are a full-service agency with patrol, scooter, bicycle, plain clothes, detectives, motors, horse-mounted, crime scene identification technicians, narcotics and vice officers, SWAT, aviation, marine patrol, intelligence/homeland security, traffic safety unit and four state-of-the-art dispatch centers serving Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, New York and California. Additionally, captains oversee NPS regional areas and officers may be deployed throughout the United States and its territories at the request of the Department of the Interior or the National Park Service. One example would be the current deployment to the Dakotas to assist the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Read more about this topic: United States Park Police
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)