by Ben Whedon
The entire police force of Goodhue, Minn., has resigned and the town has no applicants to fill the vacancies, leaving the future of law enforcement in the community uncertain.
Police Chief Josh Smith will remain in the post until Aug. 24, but has told the city he could not find anyone willing to join the force, Fox News reported.
“This has been three weeks now, we have zero applicants, and I have zero prospects. I’ve called every PD around for the youngest guys out there, getting into the game. There’s nobody getting into the game,” he said in late July. “If you want to keep the PD and this is something we want to continue going with, something needs to change dramatically and drastically, and it’s got to happen now.”
Mayor Ellen Anderson Buck told Fox 9 that the city was “a little bit blindsided by it, but we’re resilient, and we’re going to move forward.” Buck further insisted the city would continue to operate a police force. City Councilman Chris Schmit offered praise for the force’s prior performance, saying “they provided excellent safety and security to our community. And the small town policing that they did, we want that back.”
Goodhue is situated southeast of Minneapolis, the site of considerable “defund the police” demonstrations in the wake of the 2020 death of George Floyd.
While the town of 1,300 seeks to replace its resigning officers, the Sheriff’s department will take over the department’s active cases in the interim, according to MPR News.
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Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on Twitter.
Photo “Goodhue Police Department Cars” by Goodhue Police Department.
It was inevitable the anti-law enforcement movement was going to culminate in good officers simply quitting. The arrogant politicos boasted of defunding police, a knee jerk reaction to the conduct of a few bad officers. Underscore a few bad officers as the huge majority of police officers are professional and very effective. So the good police officers leave, none who are qualified want to replace them. The city then will dumb down the requisite skills of the applicants only to fill positions and you have an inferior police department. They are ineffective, almost useless so crime and corruption prevail. That has happened in small and large cities alike. The city, e.g., Portland, has infused money into law enforcement trying reconstruct what they once had with little success. What they cannot recover is the trust. What they are non addressing is the concomitant issue of left wing funded district attorneys who do not prosecute crime. The problem is deep. I feel sorry for the residents of this small Minnesota town who owe this problem to left wing democrats.