Asheville, North Carolina’s police department (APD) has seen 84 officers leave since January 2020 and is now making clear it will no longer respond to theft calls.
The Daily Mail reports the department will also forgo answering fraud and trespassing calls.
APD Police Chief David Zack cites the “protests against law enforcement” as one of the factors that led so many officers to step away from the job.
The Asheville Citizen Times notes that “the APD officer attrition rate, formerly one per month, jumped to 7.5 per month in the four months after local protests set off by Minneapolis police murdering Black resident George Floyd.” And even after the highest profile protests waned the APD continues to see an attrition rate of roughly six officers a month.
As a result, the APD now has “only 167 of its 238 sworn officer positions filled.”
APD response times to 911 calls have lengthened during the period of growing officer attrition. The May 2020 7.7 response time for “serious crimes” is now at approximately 10.6 minutes. So the decision to stop answering calls about less serious crimes is also part of an attempt to cut response times to serious ones.
Chief Zack to the city council’s Public Safety Committee about the decision not respond to calls about low-level crimes, saying, “This is what it looks like when you’re down this much, when you lose 50% of your detectives.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
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