The police chief and three officers that make up the entire four-person police department of the town of Geary, Oklahoma, and two of the town’s city council members have resigned with little explanation.
Former Police Chief Alicia Ford did not address the specific reasons for the Thursday resignations, but wrote in a social media post that the decision was difficult.
So, I looked up Geary’s last published budget (2024-2025 projected), which happens to include the last couple budgets for comparison (you can read it here).
For the police department, they’ve gone from a “capital outlay” budget of 47k in 2022-2023 to a proposed budget of 18k in 2024-2025 - I guess the town is sick of paying for new toys? More notably, “personal services” (which I take to be payroll for the police department) was 662k in 2022-2023, and was proposed to be 399k in 2024-2025. If the department remained the same size throughout, the average police officer went from about $165k each to about $100k each. Which may be a steep drop in money, but still gets you pretty fucking far in a place where the median home value is 64k, the median wage is 46k, and almost a quarter of the people live in official poverty.
One nice thing I’ll note is that the 2023-2024 budget had a decrease of 85k in ‘fines and forfeitures’, saving an average of $100 in penalties for the 853 residents.
I live close by and drive through Geary often for work. It’s a very small, very poor town. Not much there at all. Like not even a McDonald’s. Their grocery stores are a dollar general and dollar tree. Again very poor farming community. If anyone on the force was making 165k per year then yeah that’s absolutely fucking absurd for a town that size. It’s also a speed trap town. And let me tell ya, those Tahoes they are driving are new and nice