Federalize local police? You mean even more than they are already?

Just as there are calls to federalize all police functions in this country, we have this latest outrage from the IRS, "IRS seizes rural convenience store owner’s career savings in another horrible abuse of civil forfeiture.": Lyndon McLellan, a rural North Carolina convenience store owner, woke up one day to discover the IRS had seized every penny of the $107,000 in his bank account. It was all the money he had put away over the course of 13 years of assiduous, hard work.

And Glenn Harlan Reynolds, whom I met and chatted with at the NRA annual meeting about the absolute necessity for the legal profession to try to get stays of the vatious unconstitutional laws being passed in the blue states, editorializes in USA Today: "Want a lawless police force? Federalize it."

In the wake of the Baltimore riots, Al Sharpton is calling for the federal takeover of local police. Like most ideas from the loathsome Rev. Sharpton, this is a lousy one. But since federalizing local police is actually an Obama administration idea, it's worth paying a bit more attention. . .

There are (at least) two problems with this approach. The first is that federal law enforcement, especially in recent years, hasn't exactly been a haven of cool professionalism. The second is that no law enforcement agency is very good at policing itself, meaning that a national police force is likely to be less accountable, not more. . . The third problem with unifying police authority under a national umbrella is that it's much more prone to political abuse by the party in power.