An entire 20-man police force has resigned in a northern Mexican town following a series of attacks that killed the police chief and five officers over the last few months

The officers' desertion has left the 13,000 people of Ascension without local police services, Chihuahua state chief prosecutor Carlos Manuel Salas said. The mass walk-out appeared to be in protest to a recent attack by gunmen that killed three of the town's officers, Salas said. State and federal police have moved in to take over police work. But it wasn't the first deadly attack on the police department in 2011. Recently, police chief Manuel Martinez, who had been in office just seven months, was gunned down with two other officers on a nearby highway. The three had been kidnapped a day before police found their bodies blasted with bullets in the back seat of a car. The town's police force was relatively new when the bloody attacks on the officers began. The previous force had been accused by angry residents of helping drug gangs and had been forced to leave.