Anti-police attitudes and deep cuts to law enforcement budgets in cities run by left-wing governments have driven hundreds of officers from their jobs — and small towns are reaping the benefits.
Beleaguered big-city officers around the country are being welcomed to rural forces, who are thrilled to have seasoned police and don’t share the contempt some urban leaders seem to have for the men and women in blue.
POLICE REFORM LOOMS LARGE OVER LOCAL RACES AS CRIME RATES RISE
The Portland, Oregon, police department’s assistant chief, for example, left last year amid the summer’s waves of protest to become the police chief in Boise, Idaho.
Multiple officers followed him there, according to a review of exit interview forms obtained by the Oregonian. Those forms, obtained through a public records request, showed many of the officers who quit in the past year had grown frustrated with the City Council and the public’s attitude toward them.
Portland’s City Council voted last year to cut $27 million from the police bureau’s budget and is considering more reductions in funding, despite the force’s struggle to retain officers.
The police bureau lost 115 officers between July of last year and April of this year. In the first four months of 2021, Portland saw homicides spike by 800% over the same time frame last year.
Seattle, too, has seen a law enforcement exodus after cutting funding for its police amid a national conversation about police brutality and the role of officers.
City leaders slashed the Seattle Police Department budget by $46 million for fiscal year 2021.
“Due to the cascading impacts of COVID-19, threats of layoffs, and recent budget reductions, SPD is experiencing extreme staffing shortages, the future effects of which are not fully known,” the department noted in a recent briefing for the City Council.
The department noted that, due to losing roughly 200 officers in recent months, response times to 911 calls had grown longer; nearly half of all Seattle residents dialing for help had to wait longer than seven minutes for the police to arrive.
In Boston, Police Superintendent Jim Hasson said recently that officers are retiring at a “fast and furious” pace, forcing those that have remained on the force to work overtime.
Cuts to the Boston Police Department’s budget last year came from its overtime fund, when Boston’s then-Mayor Martin Walsh redirected $12 million from the fund to other services. But the rate of early retirements and departures — Boston police say they so far had 102 retirements this fiscal year through February, when they had 126 for the entirety of the previous year — has driven up the department’s reliance on its overtime fund, as has the need to station officers at protests.
Philadelphia, too, has seen officers leaving for jobs on other police forces or outside the law enforcement sector due in large part to sharply negative attitudes about policing.
“It’s the perfect storm. We are anticipating that the department is going to be understaffed by several hundred members because hundreds of guys are either retiring or taking other jobs and leaving the department,” Mike Neilon, spokesman for the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In addition to the spate of retirements, the Philadelphia police force has also reportedly struggled to attract new recruits that is compounding the growing shortage of officers. Violence is, at the same time, on the rise in Philadelphia, with the city seeing a 40% spike in homicides this year.
The Atlanta Police Department is nearly 400 officers short of the 2,000-strong force the city has set as its baseline.
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Tyrone Dennis, a former Atlanta police investigator, told WSB-TV 2 that he retired at the end of last summer after facing both scorn from the public and little support from the city.
“We’re getting screamed at, spit at,” he told the station. “We felt that we didn’t get the proper backing from the powers that be, like they demonize the officers as if the officers are wrong.”
