_____________________________________________________________________________________________
OAN’s Geraldyn Berry
8:56 AM – Wednesday, August 16, 2023
The town of Goodhue, Minnesota, is facing a significant law enforcement crisis as its entire police force resigned due to low pay.
Advertisement
The resignation was initiated by Police Chief Josh Smith at a City Council meeting on August 9th. Following his resignation, one full-time officer and five part-time employees reportedly also resigned on August 11th with their last working day is set for August 23rd. This sudden departure has left the town without local law enforcement, prompting the City Council to seek temporary assistance from the Goodhue County Sheriff’s Office.
Despite recent efforts to address the pay issue, including a 5% pay increase and a $13,000 raise for Chief Smith earlier this year, the Goodhue officers were still receiving lower wages in comparison to similar communities.
Chief Smith had previously expressed concerns about pay and recruiting during a meeting on July 26th, where he highlighted the challenge of maintaining the police department with inadequate compensation. He stressed that the city’s current pay rate of $22 an hour was insufficient to attract and retain officers, especially when other communities were offering higher salaries, often around $30 an hour.
The City Council expressed its desire to rebuild the local police force rather than permanently relying on the Goodhue County Sheriff’s Office for law enforcement services. However, the timeline for achieving this remains uncertain.
This comes as small towns across Minnesota face budget constraints and a statewide shortage of officers increasingly. The town of Morris, for example, disbanded its police department last year due to budgetary and staffing difficulties, ultimately contracting with the county sheriff’s office for law enforcement services.
Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts
Rose Rambles... 
Yep, needs to happen all over, Sheriff’s are elected, police departments aren’t and they are an agency that enforces policies and revenue collectors handing out tickets but eventually costing taxpayers much more when they burtalize people over traffic violations once a citizen questions their authority. They have become jackboot thugs, a gang, a blue line gang pitting us vs them. No one is crying over it, I use to think we needed police but the more I see how they operate and there is a plethora of bodycam and video footage proving that police are so up their own arses that they think they can just beat someone up for asking for their supervisor or disagreeing with their authority to violate your rights simply for their ego trip.
There needs to be reform and they do take an oath to uphold our constitutional rights as a peace officer, but instead call themselves law enforcement and pushing policy treating people inhumane and if no one believes this….just search bodycam footage…thousands of them and that is just the ones that the cops wore a body cam, or they didn’t ‘accidently not turn on the camera’ or ‘deleted or couldn’t find the footage’ claims, so surely there are many more that we haven’t witnessed.
So, it’s better if Sheriffs and deputies are doing the policing because they are elected and follow the constitution, not some bootthug policy pushing criminal wearing a badge and a gun and tazer.
LikeLike
Folks need to grow a set, and leave the rest behind! 💕😊🌹
LikeLike