As Goodhue Police Chief Josh Smith struggled this summer to fill vacancies in his small department, he warned the town’s City Council that unless pay and benefits improved, finding new officers would never happen.
When nothing changed, Smith quit. So did his few remaining officers, leading the Minnesota town of 1,300 residents to shutter its police force in late August.
America is in the midst of a police officer shortage that many in law enforcement blame on the twofold morale hit of 2020 — the coronavirus pandemic and criticism of police that boiled over with the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. From Minnesota to Maine, Ohio to Texas, small towns unable to fill jobs are eliminating their police departments and turning over police work to their county sheriff, a neighboring town or state police.
Wishing a very pleasant day to everyone who decided not to become a police officer.
At one point when I was 18 I almost started down that path. Thank god I didn’t.
🍻
I shudder to think of the alternate timeline where I gave up on my dream and became a Mountie.
I didn’t expect small town USA to actually defund the police first.
Try THAT in Small Town
Ha!
My town didn’t have cops for over three years, and it was totally fine.
My town had their police department disbanded after the mayor’s son got arrested for a DUI about 20 years ago and we’re doing just fine without cops.
My town growing up (~2500 people) disbanded their police force in the 90s and just contracts out with the county. Small towns are generally fine without their own police force.
What’s the town?
Killbuck, Ohio
I bet the deer are doing terrible though.
Oh no lol, I counted 44 on my way to work this morning before I got to the main road. They’re in desperate need of a culling but no one hunts them anymore because there’s a bad case of Chronic Wasting Disease going around, now they’re just starving to death because they have no natural predators in this area. Although the town got its name from Chief Kill Buck who was a Delaware chief in the area and had a town near where the current town stands.
Chronic Wasting Disease
Well there’s a rabbithole I wasn’t expecting. Horrifying what those diseases can do and how much we try to avoid them.
Fortunately there’s no evidence it affects humans. But then there’s no evidence it doesn’t, either.
Ever since they changed the name from Chillbuck there’s been a noticeable but difficult to pin down shift in attitudes
Small town in Ohio, we disbanded our local Police, and instead have county police here now
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Yeah, if they’re going to stick with traditional US law enforcement, county police are the best way forward. Sheriffs offices should be abolished nation wide
Huh? Sheriff’s departments are the county police.
They’re not police in the way we regularly think of them. There are county police forces and there are county sheriff’s and while theres a decent degree of overlap in what their expected duties are, they aren’t the same thing. Sheriffs have very little, if any accountability to their community or oversight from local and state authorities. The only leg up that sheriff’s have in my view is that they’re an elected position. However, the way they’re structured makes that aspect even more ripe for corruption. Here’s a decent article breaking down the argument against sheriff offices. And a video about it if that’s more your jam
very uplifting news
This would be a good opportunity to try out some sort of volunteer community defense system and crisis intervention units. Both would be far more cost effective. If it were arranged appropriately to make volunteers accountable, it’d be a lot safer than traditional policing
But then the only white people who get to shoot black people risk being charged for it!
Oh no! Who’s going to drive all their tanks?
Law and order? Can’t afford’er!
At least 521 U.S. towns and cities with populations of 1,000 to 200,000 disbanded policing between 1972 and 2017, according to a peer-reviewed 2022 paper by Rice University Professor of Economics Richard T. Boylan.
In the past two years, at least 12 small towns have dissolved their departments.
That works out to an average of 11 per year. I haven’t needed to think about numbers in a long time. Did I fuck that up? Cause if not, this sounds like a lot of panic over losing fewer police departments than the norm.
“No one wants to harass black people any more.”
