Why police have been quitting in droves over the past year

The fact that the protests were directed at them pushed many officers to quit, he said. “They said that we have become the bad guys, and we did not get into this to become the bad guys.” A sense that the city itself did not back its police was a key reason for the departures, according to officers themselves as well as police and city officials. Officers felt that they should have been praised rather than pilloried after struggling to contain chaotic protests. Low pay deepened the frustration. With a starting salary around $37,000, few officers can afford houses in Asheville, where housing prices have sharply increased in recent years. Finally, officers said they were asked to handle too much; they were constantly thrown at tangled societal problems like mental health breakdowns or drug overdoses, they said, for which they were ill-equipped — then blamed when things went wrong.
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