1. A “state police force” is an agency that has the legal authority and the routinely funded, practiced ability to enforce laws throughout a state. A “state highway patrol,” by contrast, refers to an agency that is limited either in its legal authority or routine bureaucratic practice to enforcing only or almost exclusively highway regulations and traffic laws.

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21. Ray, “From Cossack to Trooper.”

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29. Torres, Handbook of State Police, 260; Smith, The State Police, 83.

30. There were earlier statewide agencies during the nineteenth century, but these were not state police agencies as contemporaries recognized. Smith, The State Police, 34–39. A Massachusetts State Police was created in 1865, for instance, but its duties and personnel were severely limited (Torres, Handbook of State Police, 166.) and it was not until 1921 that a successor agency was enlarged to serve as the commonwealth's primary uniformed branch responsible for statewide law enforcement. Similarly, Texas created a Texas State Police in 1870 during a Reconstruction government, but the end of Reconstruction led to that force's replacement by the Texas Rangers, whose portfolio mainly included border security and cattle rustling rather than law enforcement Ben H. Procter, “Texas Rangers,” Texas State Historical Association, June 15, 2010, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/met04. I do not include these as “state police forces” because were irregular or severely restricted in authority (or both), a rule that also excludes state sheriffs, as in an early Nebraska experiment, and other agencies with as few as four officers that could not effectively conduct routine police activities whatever their legal authorities.

31. Vollmer and Parker, Crime and the State Police, 49–53.

32. Torres, Handbook of State Police.

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