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.
Do you have a gun? Can you fight?
No? Then you need cops.
Evidently they don’t
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No need for the personal insults. Be civil.
If he doesn’t have a gun and can’t fight, then he needs cops to protect him from people who do have guns and can fight.
Same goes for anyone who is anti-cop, anti-gun, and can’t fight. Is that everyone? No. I never said it was.
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What are you talking about? It’s a fact of reality that people who can’t defend themselves need others to do it for them. There’s nothing ‘offensive’ about it. I don’t think less of anyone who can’t fight or doesn’t own a gun. Do you?
You’re actually just spewing nonsense at this point. Sorry, I’m going to block you.
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Reading you two’s interactions and then seeing the user names made me laugh. Usernamescheckout.
I didn’t expect small town USA to actually defund the police first.
Try THAT in Small Town
Ha!
Yeah. They can’t keep up with the funding that big cities have to outfit their cops in cool tactical gear.
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?
[Redacted for privacy reasons]
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
My town didn’t have cops for over three years, and it was totally fine.
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
this is the reality, we have several overlapping forces who compete for staff leaving some places overflowing with officers and some completely empty.
the whole county vs city vs state police forcing inefficiency needs to be addressed.
Honestly, the USA should nationalize the police. Standards and police academies (just a movie in many places, not an actual thing).
Cops could be rotated, and internal affairs could find and remove bad cops. Less local corruption.
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I don’t know enough to know if nationalizing the police is a good idea, but that’s already an issue. Police can and do just move from one department to another.
At the very least there should be a national license or record that follows them.
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Solution: outlaw police unions and void their existing contracts. They’re the one category of unions I don’t support.
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I mean it works pretty decently in Canada. We have two ways of becoming a police officer and two systems. The College route is a two year program that focuses on police sciences, psychology, ethics and law. Then there is the RCMP route where you get shipped off for intensive training where you live millitary boot camp style for 6 months for a concentrated version with some physical training and then basically get a cadet status to be apprenticed out to a detachment.
Municipalities can choose to either have a police department run by them or to contract a federal detachment of the RCMP. The RCMP are only on the hook to solve federal law and bylaw enforcement is largely outside their perveiw. They are however cheaper for a Municipality because they are paid for in part by provincial government and 30 percent of their cost comes from the federal level.
The accountability is I think a little better than hiring people with just a GED. The investment of time and education makes a difference particularly since there’s a pretty heavy emphasis on de-escalation models of policing up here. Having an officer actually draw their firearm up here much less point it at a person is a shock.
At least it’s one target to fight to fix rather than every small town’s own shitty way to be shitty, and blue states would in theory try to counter the red state shittiness.
Yeah, I was with him until he said some bullshit about ‘rotating’ cops.
Always something, lol.
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very uplifting news
But then the only white people who get to shoot black people risk being charged for it!
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
george zimmermans
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.”
I believe it.
It’s ridiculously expensive to hire cops and equip them with gear that makes them competitive with other cops.
