In the modern context, I don’t think there’s necessarily a principled distinction. The Long Beach city government is probably being pretty smart. Still, in a historical context, this is a big change. In the English-speaking world, standing national armies are relatively new, and government-paid firefighters and police forces are even newer. But employees of the state (or the king) have been prosecuting crimes since (checking Wikipedia)...at least 1243 .
There are two implications here I’m not entirely certain of.
The first is that enforcing laws is not a “similar purpose” as above.
The second is that the government soliciting volunteers to perform a task constitutes no longer considering that task a function of government.
In the modern context, I don’t think there’s necessarily a principled distinction. The Long Beach city government is probably being pretty smart. Still, in a historical context, this is a big change. In the English-speaking world, standing national armies are relatively new, and government-paid firefighters and police forces are even newer. But employees of the state (or the king) have been prosecuting crimes since (checking Wikipedia)...at least 1243 .