Some cities may dismantle law enforcement. What happened in places that already have?
During a rally Sunday calling for Minneapolis police department reforms following the death of George Floyd — a black man who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes — city council members took a bold stand and said they’d do away with police altogether.
At least 9 of the 13 members took to the stage to announce their intent, CBS reported, while Mayor Jacob Frey was booed out of a protest Saturday for saying he doesn’t support abolishing police.
In a statement shared on Twitter by City Council President Lisa Bender, the members said the city council would take “immediate steps” to dismantle the police department through “policy and budget decisions.”
“Decades of police reform efforts have proved that the Minneapolis Police Department cannot be reformed, and will never be accountable for its action,” the statement reads. “We are here today to begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department and creating a transformative model for cultivating safety in our city.”
It’s a seemingly radical proclamation — but Minneapolis wouldn’t be the first city in the U.S. to operate without law enforcement.
Camden, New Jersey
The city of Camden in western New Jersey, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, is small by Minneapolis standards. It boasts a population of roughly 73,500 people compared with Minneapolis’ nearly 430,000, according to U.S. Census records.
But the New Jersey city has been hailed in recent days as a beacon of police reform — a model by which Minneapolis could reshape its own department, Newsweek reported.
In 2012, the crime rate in Camden was one of the worst in the country with “a record-high murder rate that rivaled national rates of the most dangerous countries,” the politics magazine Governing reported in 2014.
That’s when Camden “did something quite radical: It disbanded its 141-year-old police force,” according to the magazine.
Budget constraints had already diminished the department, leaving too few officers to patrol increasingly dangerous streets, Governing reported. So in May 2013, the city laid off its entire police force and handed the reigns to the county. Most officers were rehired as county employees at a much lower pay rate with half the benefits.
But the switch to community policing, led by former chief of police Scott Thompson from 2013 to 2019, led to what Bloomberg News described as a “steep decline in crime” — homicides fell from 67 in 2012 to 25 in 2019.
It took some getting used to.
The rebuild meant the county force was double the size of the former department, Bloomberg reported, and many of the officers live in nearby suburbs and don’t look like the people they were policing, according to the local chapter of the NAACP.
About “90% of Camden’s population is minority,” the NAACP chapter president told Bloomberg.
Some were also uncomfortable with the sheer volume of officers, the media outlet reported.
But the new police were trained in de-escalation techniques, given body cameras and held to account by an 18-page use-of-force policy that expressly defines reasonable force in the line of duty and requires officers to intervene when their colleagues violate the policy, according to Bloomberg.
“By the department’s account, reports of excessive force complaints in Camden have dropped 95% since 2014,” Bloomberg reported.
Small towns plagued by shortage of resources
Elsewhere in the U.S., the dismantling of police departments hasn’t been by choice.
Budget constraints and a lack of resources have shut down police forces in small town America, such as Lyford, Texas.
Until late 2019, KRGV reported just three officers comprised the entire police department in Lyford — home to less than 3,000 people, by the U.S. Census Bureau’s count. In one month’s time, the officers all took jobs elsewhere, forcing the department to shutter in October, according to the TV station.
Neighborhood watch remained in its place, and deputies with the county sheriff department now patrol the city, CBS 4 reported. City leaders say they plan to restart the department and are reviewing applications for a new police chief, but “when the department will officially restart is still up in the air,” according to the TV station.
In the interim, the Valley Morning Star reported sheriff’s deputies have taken too long to respond to residents’ emergency calls. One resident told the newspaper it took them 30 minutes to get to his home after a robbery.
In Massachusetts, all four members of the Blandford Police Department quit in 2018, forcing it to close, The New York Times reported. The town had been in talks of merging its law enforcement operations with a neighboring community at the time.
“Small towns are having this discussion around maintaining the most basic functions of local government, police services being one of them,” Josh Garcia, the acting town administrator for Blandford, told The Times.
It’s a similar story in northeastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota, where the Duluth News Tribune reported small town police departments “have increasingly closed their doors as shrinking populations suffocate their already small budgets and it becomes harder to recruit staff to the remote locations.”
Instead, they contract with local sheriff’s offices — a cost saving measure that means only a few deputies “provide more services throughout counties that often span over 300 miles,” according to the newspaper.
It’s not a new concept. At a time when the overall number of law enforcement agencies was growing, The Dallas Morning News reported smaller agencies with less than 10 officers dropped 2.3 percent between 2004 and 2008.
By 2012, several rural towns in Texas had axed their police departments and either contracted with the sheriff’s office or tried to rebuild with a “scaled-down force,” according to the newspaper.
States without sheriffs
There are three states in the U.S. that operate without a sheriff’s office: Alaska, Hawaii and Connecticut, according to The National Sheriffs’ Association.
Alaska, unlike much of the U.S., does not have counties, sheriff’s offices or deputies, the Alaska Department of Public Safety says on its website. Instead, Alaska state troopers “provide complete law enforcement services for areas outside of the traditional ‘city limits’ of most Alaska cities.”
One in three Alaska communities — primarily home to Alaska Natives — has no local law enforcement either, according to an investigation by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica.
In Hawaii, deputy sheriffs serve under the state’s Department of Public Safety Sheriff Division.
Connecticut voted to abolish the sheriff’s office in 2000, The Middletown Press reported.
“The vote represents the final victory for critics of the system, who said it was outmoded and riddled with corruption,” the newspaper reported after the ballot measure passed. “The sheriffs, the last vestige of county government, have been enmeshed in controversy in recent years as one scandal after another hit the system.”
The move abolished a 350-year-old system and pushed out eight elected sheriffs, according to the Hartford Courant.
Under the restructured system, 942 special deputy sheriffs who provided security for the courthouses and transported prisoners were moved under the Judicial Department’s purview, the newspaper reported. Another 318 deputy sheriffs who served legal papers became state marshals under a newly-established State Marshal Commission.
This story was originally published June 8, 2020 at 12:47 PM with the headline "Some cities may dismantle law enforcement. What happened in places that already have?."
