We come from a place where we count the days
Until nothing, until nothing, until nothing…
We come from a place where we count the days
Until nothing, until nothing, until nothing…
We are running down the street in our underwear
We are running up the hill, it’s over there
We are running down the street in our underwear
We are running up the hill, it’s over there
Cause nothing, ever, happens here.
Cause nothing, ever, happens here.
Where everyone keeps off the grass
No littering, no loitering
No nothing, no nothing, no nothing…
We are running down the street in our underwear
We are running up the hill, it’s over there (Oh my Lord)
We are running down the street in our underwear (Oh my Lord, cause nothing happens)
We are running up the hill, it’s over there (Oh my Lord)
We come from a place where we count the days
Until nothing, until nothing, until nothing
We come from a place where we count the days
Until nothing, until nothing, until nothing (Oh my Lord)
We are running down the street in our under wear (cause nothing happens)
We are running up the hill, it’s over there (Oh my Lord)
We are running down the streets in in our underwear (Oh my Lord, cause nothing happens)
We are running up the hill, it’s over there (Oh my Lord).
On a more serious note, the reasons this is bad:
-In rural New England, domestic crime is high. IE, men beating women. So this leaves those women and their children out in the cold with a significantly longer wait time for state police or sherriffs to show up.
-Meth production is big in rural places, and the robberies associated with it. Local law enforcement are the eyes and ears of this problem.
-Speed trapping is one thing, but usually that does not fill local coffers. That money gets collected at the state level, so there is no real gain to speed trapping. Likely, it’s the opposite. With no town cop, the roads there in Croydon are going to be a lot less safe.
-Local police in New England perform wellness checks on the sick and elderly. So throw that out, too.
I could go on, but in short, this turn of events was bad for that town. I know why they did it, too. Selectboard was trying to rein in a budget and police chief likely asked for a new cruiser and a deputy. But that board somehow got off track by targeting the police Dept. Likely as a deflection from an inflated budget somewhere else in the town government that they didn’t want to touch because their buddies run that part of the town. This will come back to bite them.
And fwiw, this dynamic is totally different than in big city police departments, where so much of the bad shit happens all the time that we discuss here often. In small town America, for better or worse, the local police force of 1 to 3 officers is the front line of direct help that lots of poor and disadvantaged people desperately need, not to mention being the providers of other forms of public safety. Yes, there are bad cops everywhere, and mostly good ones. That’s not the point here: the point is that the role of police is different in rural places than it is in urban places.
