INKOM — After consistently being unable to find qualified officers willing to work part-time hours, the city of Inkom has disbanded its police force.

Effective Monday, the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office will instead provide law enforcement services to the 800 or so residents of Inkom.

“We have just had a pretty hard time keeping part-time officers,” Inkom Mayor Max Shaffer said about the recent decision, which the Inkom City Council approved in a 3-0 vote on Oct. 11. “The Inkom Police Department had never had a full-time employee, our chief recently resigned and as time has gone on other officers have moved or pursued other opportunities. We decided that it might be best to have Bannock County take over and disband what we had here because there wasn’t much left.”

For at least the next fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, 2024, a deputy with the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office will spend at least five hours of their shift patrolling the streets of Inkom every day, says Bannock County Sheriff Tony Manu. Prior to the change, Inkom’s police force typically employed two part-time police officers and never more than four officers, Shaffer said.

The arrangement is not all that unusual for this region. The Bannock County Sheriff’s Office has long contracted with smaller towns or cities within the county, including McCammon, Arimo, Lava Hot Springs and Downey, to provide law enforcement services. The Bingham County Sheriff’s Office took over the policing in Aberdeen after that city’s police department disbanded in October 2021.

And according to a recent article published by The Associated Press, the trend isn’t altogether new, nor is it unique.

America, according to the AP article, is in the midst of a police officer shortage that many in law enforcement blame on the two-fold morale hit of 2020 — the coronavirus pandemic and criticism of police that boiled over with the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.

From Minnesota to Maine, Ohio to Texas, small towns unable to fill jobs are eliminating their police departments and turning over police work to their county sheriff, a neighboring town or state police. the AP article says.

At least 521 U.S. towns and cities with populations of 1,000 to 200,000 disbanded policing between 1972 and 2017, according to a peer-reviewed 2022 paper by Rice University Professor of Economics Richard T. Boylan.

While Manu says the move will create a burden for Bannock County, albeit a small one considering the county had previously been responding to all felony crimes in Inkom and many other incidents in the small town, Shaffer says from a financial standpoint the move was an easy decision to make.

“The contract is about $30,000 less per year than what we had budgeted for our in-house policing,” Shaffer said. “And so the money part of it was a no-brainer.”

Manu said all the cities or towns the sheriff’s office contracts with pays the same hourly rate, about $42, for Bannock County to provide law enforcement services. The amount each town pays differs based on the amount of hours deputies spend there, but for Inkom that annual cost for its new contract with the county is approximately $76,650.

The rate for this fiscal year is the last of a three year plan that Manu established soon after he became the sheriff in 2020. Prior to him becoming sheriff, that amount hadn’t been changed for decades and it was actually costing the county money to provide law enforcement services to other towns in the southern portion of the county, he says.

“When I took over that rate hadn’t changed in like 20 years,” Manu said. “The contract that we had was maybe a little less than $20 per hour and wasn’t even enough to cover our basic costs. It didn’t even cover the cost of our entry level deputy.”

Bannock County will again revisit its contracts with other towns it provides law enforcement services for next year. Whether or not towns like Inkom, Downey and Lava Hot Springs continue its relationship with the county will come after that contract, particularly the hourly rate, is potentially changed again.

Manu said the recent move was not a political decision, but was mostly steeped in the notion that it’s important that the residents of Inkom can feel safe knowing they have a police presence in their small town.

Shaffer said the next move for Inkom will involve liquidating the equipment it had for its now-disbanded police force, which includes a small amount of firearms, ammunition, Tasers, bulletproof vests and three patrol cars.

Both Shaffer and Manu expressed optimism surrounding the decision and are glad to have gotten everything worked out with no major hiccups.

“Our goal is to fill the void for the needs that they have,” Manu said. “This is about us providing a service and not leaving a little fraction of Bannock County without any type of law enforcement service.”