What is the difference between a sheriff’s office and a city police department?

American policing was built from the county and the municipality upwards rather than from a national force downwards, and both offices survive from that history. The result is that two bodies with different legal bases and different constituencies frequently police overlapping ground.

That overlap is the ordinary condition rather than an anomaly: with 17,541 general-purpose state and local agencies, a single county can contain a sheriff’s office, several municipal departments, and state and special-jurisdiction agencies as well.

Territory

A sheriff’s office has countywide jurisdiction; a city department polices the municipality. Where a city sits inside a county, both may have authority in the same streets.

How the head of the agency holds office

The head of a sheriff’s office is usually an elected official. A municipal chief is normally appointed by the city government.

Legal basis

Sheriffs offices are generally empowered by the state to serve counties and independent cities; municipal departments are created under municipal authority.

Functions

These vary by state and are the part most often over-generalised. Jail operation, court security, service of process, patrol and criminal investigation are distributed differently between the two offices in different states.

• Common belief: All sheriffs run jails and provide court security.

  In practice: These functions are assigned by state law and are distributed differently between sheriffs offices, municipal departments and separate corrections agencies depending on the state.

• Common belief: A sheriff outranks a city police chief.

  In practice: They head separate agencies with different legal bases and different constituencies. Neither commands the other.

• Common belief: Every county has a sheriff and every city has a police department.

  In practice: Neither is universal. Arrangements differ by state, and some municipalities are policed by a county or state agency rather than by a department of their own.

• Common belief: The sheriff/city-police split is how local policing works generally.

  In practice: It is an American arrangement. France, for example, has no equivalent elected county-level office — local policing there is the municipal agent under the mayor.

• State law determines what a sheriff’s office does, so the office differs across the fifty states.
• Some states place jail operation with the sheriff; others with a separate corrections agency.
• Whether the sheriff is elected, and for how long, is set by state law and in some places by county charter.
• Where a municipality has no department of its own, county or state agencies police it directly.

United States

At the 2018 census there were 17,541 general-purpose state and local law-enforcement agencies: about 67% local police departments, 17% sheriffs offices, and 15% primary state, tribal, special-jurisdiction agencies, constables and marshals. City police departments are the largest category by count; sheriffs offices are the second.

France

France has no analogue. Local policing there is the municipal police agent acting under the mayor’s authority, and there is no elected county-level law-enforcement office. The sheriff/city-police distinction does not travel — it is a feature of American county government rather than a general category of local policing.

The accountability routes differ with the office. An elected sheriff answers to county voters at an election and to the courts in law; an appointed chief answers to the city government that appointed them. Neither route is a substitute for the other, and a complaint sent to the wrong agency is simply returned.

• The functions of a sheriff’s office are set by state law and vary between states. This page states what the national statistical sources support — that the head of a sheriff’s office is usually elected and that the office has countywide jurisdiction — and does not assert that every county has a sheriff or that sheriffs perform identical functions nationally.

Related: what police jurisdiction means, municipal police, and the United States dossier.