How come some places have police departments and some places have sheriffs?
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The Sheriff is the highest executive position in a _county_. They are in charge of county law enforcement but may have other executive duties (like overseeing jails and serving warrants). This is an elected position.
Police are law enforcement officers in _cities or towns_. They are typically _not_ elected positions and have no duties outside of peacekeeping and law enforcement.
In the US, Police are a city department and Sheriff is a county department. So if you are in a city with a Police department, you call them, if you are not in a city you call the county Sheriff’s office. In my experience, the Sheriff’s deputies are much nicer to deal with than the city officers.
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Sheriff comes from an Anglo-Saxon title “shire-reeve”. That was a person in charge of administering a shire, which involved collecting taxes, and enforcing laws.
A “shire” is more or less synonymous with a “county”, at least in England. Most countries that inherited their common law traditions from England use the words interchangeably.
A sheriff therefore, is the law enforcement official in a county. In the US, they’re usually elected by the residents of the county.
Technically, only the Sheriff can enforce county laws. However, they’re allowed to delegate their authority to “deputies”. The Sheriff’s deputies are the actual people who wear a uniform and patrol.
Sheriffs often also administer the county jails, serve warrants, administer evictions and other various duties that are tangential to law enforcement.
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Police departments derive from the tradition of a municipal police department, especially the London Metropolitan Police Department, which was the first real professional police department.
They generally serve as law enforcement for a city, rather than a whole county. They also generally only enforce the laws, and don’t do a lot of the extra stuff.
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In general, a city will always be within a county. If the city does not have its own police department, then the only law enforcement will be the county Sheriff.
If the city does choose to have their own police department, then often the Sheriff will choose to not routinely patrol or enforce laws inside city limits, even though they technically could if they wanted to.
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