Of course back in the day small towns mostly got their cops by recruiting young retirees from the big city. That’s how Brody landed in Jaws. And really for a lot of these do they really need them? If you’re a town of under 10,000 just let the county handle it, give them jurisdiction and move on.
That’s all well and good, until said small town suddenly gets flooded with illegals, and this is happening all across the country, again, all by design.
I live in a small farm town equidistant berween two small cities. We shuttered our PD and contracted with the sherriff’s department and it’s been fine. Crime has actually gone down as a peculiar effect of the housing crisis driving rents up. Riff raff can’t afford to live here anymore, we don’t have homeless because there are no begging or shoplifting opportunities. There are too many retirees, dogs and guns for porch pirating, plus cameras and motion activated security lights make night time pilfering high risk compared to the denser cities to the north and south of us.
Our state has open school districts so our schools stay full with out of district kids because our schools have better than average test scores. The commuter kids keep our funding up while not increasing our property taxes so that’s sweet.
The only rub is being a red county in a blue state.