Moorhead PD pulls cops from schools due to officer shortage

Photo: Moorhead Police Department, Facebook

Last year at this time, the Moorhead Police Department became the first in the state to withdrew officers from local schools in response to restrictions passed by the DFL-run legislature that handcuffed school resource officers responding to misbehavior in the hallways. After months of turmoil and ultimately a legislative fix, Moorhead SROs returned to the schools they had been stationed in for more than 25 years.

But this fall, Moorhead police will once again be missing from the city’s public schools. Not due to another standoff with clueless lawmakers, but due to a shortage of officers that Inforum says has left authorities little choice.

In Moorhead, there are 11 openings right now with four more officers scheduled to be gone for paternity leave soon. There are 62 sworn officers at MPD.

“They (police departments) are shorter and shorter staffed. We get people put on forced overtime to meet minimum coverages. It is not sustainable to keep doing it this way,” [Moorhead Police Chief Shannon] Monroe said.

Because the police department is short of so many officers, there will be no SROs at the high school, middle school, career academy, or floating between elementary schools this fall.

Instead of the three SROs usually available to the district, administrators will rely more on security officers already on staff to deal with behavioral problems that crop up. In addition, Moorhead police have assured school officials they can respond within minutes if called upon for backup.

“The way the police department is set up, there is always a patrol beat within all of our schools. All the schools are covered. I have done a ride-along, and watched them work and train. I don’t have any concerns. If we do have an incident, they will be there in five minutes or less,” said [Moorhead schools operations and emergency management director Steve] Moore.

“Our emergency operations plan is not based on having SROs stationed at the school. The way we train and prepare, we always partner with the Moorhead police and fire department on how we respond. We are revamping our first responder maps for police and fire and that clarifies critical locations and entry points into the schools for first responders,” Moore said.

It’s hard to tell if or when the Moorhead force will be in a position to assign officers to the schools again. The staffing shortage is a big issue that doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon.

“Just in Minnesota alone, 25% of our workforce will retire between this year and next year and there aren’t the candidates to follow,” said Moorhead Police Chief Shannon Monroe.

“When you have metro areas like Minneapolis and the suburbs, everybody tries to attract staff from their neighbors and when they do that there is a huge, upward pressure on salaries. So the wealthy communities can attract staff from the less-wealthy communities and there are cities that see that coming and have tried to retain staff by raising salaries,” Monroe said.

Actually, leftist legislators and other elected officials who started the defund police movement in Minneapolis do bear much of the blame for the officer shortage. The crunch may have started in Minneapolis, but it spread to Morehead and other departments statewide. Four years later, the shortage of officers and threat to public safety show no sign of bottoming out.