A small Indiana town doesn’t have a police force because all its officers just quit!
(WashingtonPost)- Every one of these residents was left without a police department, when the town marshal and four reserve deputies walked out of the job in protest on Monday, the Associated Press reported.
“We have had issues with the town board, and there are some activities there where I felt like they were serving their own agenda,” former Bunker Hill town marshal Michael Thomison toldWXIN.
In a statement released Wednesday and obtained by WTTV, the Bunker Hill Town Council expressed surprise.
“The resignation of the entire police force has come as a shock to the council,” it read. “It has never been the goal to dismantle or otherwise endanger the town police department or officers.”
Some of their grievances were of a familiar variety — complaints about financial cuts to the department.
“They would not communicate with us or the officers and they kept scaling back,” said Thomison, a four-year member of the force.
He later told BuzzFeed News, “We can’t make this up. They were just not receptive to having a police department.”
The cuts, the officers alleged, forced every officer in the department to share a single set of body armor — a lack of sufficient resources that further endangered them.
“I did not want to send someone out there with bad body armor, so I would take mine off and provide it to the other officers,” Thomison told WXIN. “I told them we have to provide this, there is an IC code that explains that and says that the town has to provide that body armor.”