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While federal agents and sheriff's deputies were searching businesses in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., on Feb. 23 in connection with a federal food-stamp fraud case, the towns' marshals arrived.

In almost any community in America, the local police would have been notified before such a raid — if only to ask them to block traffic from coming down the street. But no one notified the marshals in Hildale and Colorado City, collectively known as Short Creek, which is home to the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

The marshals asked sheriff's deputies what was happening. They "were told to just, basically, go away," said Mohave County, Ariz., Sheriff Jim McCabe. "And they did."

A lot of people would like to see the marshals go away, and they are waiting to see if the U.S. Department of Justice and a federal judge do, too.

A federal jury in Phoenix last week found the marshals and the municipal governments in Short Creek guilty of discrimination against people who do not follow FLDS leaders. The Justice Department can ask Judge H. Russel Holland to order changes, including the disbanding of the marshals.

"For there ever to be a decent community, there's gotta be new faces, new control," Richard Holm, a former FLDS member, told The Associated Press after the verdict.

Arizona's largest newspaper, The Arizona Republic, weighed in Tuesday with an editorial calling for disbanding the marshals' office.

But such action has been sought before, and for it to work this time would be unprecedented.

The towns lost a lawsuit in 2014 that accused them of refusing to issue utility connections to former FLDS member Ron Cooke and his wife Jinjer . After the verdict, then-Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, who joined the Cookes as a plaintiff, asked federal Judge James Teilborg to disband the marshals and approve a plan in which the towns would negotiate an agreement to pay the sheriff's offices in Mohave County, Ariz., and Washington County, Utah, to police the towns.

Teilborg denied the request. He said disbanding the marshals "would burden both defendants and the state with a layer of bureaucracy extending into potential perpetuity."

The latest civil-rights lawsuit focused more on the police than did the Cooke case. But Jeff Matura, the lawyer who represented Colorado City at the seven-week civil trial, said he can find no record of another judge anywhere in the country ordering a police force dissolved.

"It might sound good in the media," Matura said, "but practically speaking it has a whole host of problems and issues."

Booting the marshals from Short Creek could mean fewer services for residents, he argues, since the sheriff's offices on both sides of Uzona Avenue, which divides Hildale from Colorado City, wouldn't be obligated to place deputies in the towns at all times. Short Creek has seven marshals and at least one is on duty 24 hours a day, Matura said.

"If someone dials 911," he said, "they can't be waiting 45 minutes or an hour for someone to show up."

Matura also points out that jurors did not side against the marshals on every Justice Department claim. They found the marshals violated equal-protection clauses of the Constitution through unreasonable seizures of property, unreasonable seizures of a person and arresting people without probable cause. But in issuing their verdict, they disagreed with the feds and found the marshals did not conduct unreasonable searches, make unreasonable traffic or pedestrian stops, or use excessive force.

The more typical result of such a ruling would be for a judge to mandate policy changes and appoint a monitor to oversee those changes, Matura said. His clients are willing to work with the Justice Department to implement such changes.

"We're hopeful we can still work out some form of agreement," he said.

Disbanding the marshals isn't necessarily the most radical solution, said University of Michigan law professor Margo Schlanger, who studies civil-rights cases and court-ordered remedies. She said the judge could decide to put the marshals into receivership.

That would mean Hildale and Colorado City would fund the marshals but have no control over them.

"That's a pretty extreme remedy," Schlanger said. "Under receivership, there's no longer a democratically accountable authority running the department."

If you break up the marshals, she said, the local sheriffs — who are accountable to voters — would control policing.

The sheriffs already have a presence in the towns. They will have deputies patrol. The sheriffs also serve court papers in the towns. Some people who don't follow the FLDS call the sheriff's dispatchers directly when they need assistance. Dialing 911 in Short Creek will get you the marshals.

McCabe has had extra deputies patrolling the Colorado City side the past few years through a grant from the Arizona attorney general's office, but that money has run out. McCabe added that he and Washington County Sheriff Cory Pulsipher are ready to assume 24-hour policing in Short Creek.

The day of the searches and arrests that led to indictments against 11 people on charges related to misuse of food stamps, McCabe said he and Pulsipher talked about some of the policing details, including getting each other's deputies certified to work in the other state. It would require the deputies to take a test, the hardest part of which, McCabe said, is learning the codes for the traffic offenses in the new state.

"I don't think anybody really has any faith in the marshals' office," McCabe said. "We, meaning the sheriff's office, never saw them as a police force. We saw them as a church enforcement squad."

Twitter: @natecarlisle