I have spent my entire career in law enforcement, and I have never seen anything as dangerous as what is happening right now.

Across the United States, police departments are not just struggling; they are shutting down. Entire agencies are disappearing, and officers are walking away. Communities are being left without the most basic government function: protection. This is more than a staffing issue. It is a collapse.

Since 2020, towns across the country have seen their police departments dissolve, sometimes overnight. In Goodhue, Minnesota, the entire department resigned after the chief warned the city council that he could not recruit officers under the current pay structure.

With no changes made, the chief resigned and his officers followed, leading the department to shut down entirely. In Kenly, North Carolina, the whole force quit after conflicts with a newly hired town manager. In Springfield, Maine, the department closed because it couldn’t recruit or keep a single qualified officer. In Weber City, Virginia, the chief and a sergeant were fired, the remaining officers resigned and the department collapsed immediately.

Illinois is now part of this trend. Hampton, in Rock Island County, voted in 2023 to eliminate its police department and transfer policing duties to the sheriff. Thomasboro, in Champaign County, did the same in 2025 after years of staffing and budget pressures.

In both towns, residents packed public meetings and pleaded with their elected officials not to eliminate local policing. They warned of slower response times and the loss of officers who knew their community. Their warnings were ignored.

The list of closures keeps expanding. What I mentioned is only a few examples.

These closures are significant because they reveal a deeper truth. Police departments are collapsing for similar reasons across the country. Politics has become one of the most destructive forces in modern policing. Chiefs are pushed out, officers are targeted and departments are used as political tools. In some towns, a single political decision has wiped out an entire agency overnight.

Budgets are another major pressure point. Many small towns dedicate a large share of their operating budgets to policing, and when costs rise and revenues fall, police departments are the first to face cuts.

Mandates like body-worn cameras, while beneficial, impose heavy financial burdens on small agencies that cannot absorb the costs. Some Illinois towns have openly stated they cannot afford to comply and have chosen to eliminate their departments instead.

Recruitment and retention have reached a crisis point. National data shows that resignations and retirements have increased significantly since 2020. Departments that once had long lists of applicants now have none. Chiefs cannot hire. Officers are burned out. The pipeline is empty. When a department cannot recruit, it fails.

Leadership failures often accelerate the collapse. When officers lose confidence in their leadership or feel abandoned by elected officials, they leave. When enough of them leave at once, the department cannot function. That is exactly what happened in Goodhue and Kenly, and it is happening in small towns across Illinois and the rest of the country.

This doesn’t mean that merging police services is always a bad idea. In some cases, consolidation can be beneficial. However, that doesn’t mean shutting down a police department is a good solution. Consolidation can work when it is carefully planned and supported by police leadership, elected officials and the community.

What is truly disastrous isn’t consolidation itself but the complete closure of a police department, which leaves residents without a dedicated police force and deprives a community of officers who understand its people, issues and history.

When a police department closes, the community doesn’t get a real replacement. The sheriff or state police might step in, but they are already stretched thin. Response times grow longer, investigations slow down and victims wait longer for help. In some areas, no one responds at all. Residents in towns that lost their departments report waiting hours for a deputy to arrive. Some have been told that no one is available. This is unacceptable.

Every community deserves a dedicated police force. Whether it is a local department or a coalition of agencies working together, people need officers who know their streets, families and issues. Anything less is dangerous. Anything less puts lives at risk.

The collapse of police departments is more than a law enforcement issue. It is a public safety crisis that threatens the stability of entire communities. It signals that the fundamental promise of government is breaking. To reverse this trend, we must face the truth: politics is pushing officers away, budgets are inadequate for modern policing, recruitment and retention are faltering and leadership is often failing.

Communities can’t thrive without strong, stable and well-led police forces. We need to rebuild, support and invest in them. Ignoring this crisis will come at a very high cost.

• Tom Weitzel is the former chief of the Riverside Police Department and spent 37 years in law enforcement. He can be reached at tqweitzel@outlook.com. Follow him on X at @chiefweitzel or TikTok at tiktok.com/@chiefweitzel.