Sheriff’s office needs leadership without platitudes
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Editor,
Taking advantage of current national tragedies involving guns our want to be sheriff candidate uses the Letter to the Editor section to submit portions of his resume. I again implore him to instead focus on specific ways to fix our problems here.
Lake County’s budget for the sheriff ’s office is slightly less the $4,000,000,000 you may be used to having to work with and our staff falls a little under the 600+ employees you worked with. Yet even your past and the current resources of your past agency shows the Sacramento Sheriffs is one of the least populated per capita law enforcement agencies in the State of California with a problem of recruiting new officers. Leadership? This info however - and as important as your SWAT training may be - ignores the issues in our somewhat smaller location.
You speak in generalities of contemporary policing and vision necessary to confront criminal behavior. You say our schools need SWAT. That is a response, tell us how we prevent the occurrence. In Sacramento one such SWAT response in 1991 saved the lives of almost 50 hostages but only ended up getting 3 or 4 killed. What is an acceptable number of hostage deaths for you to still consider SWAT the best answer?
I ask you to provide a specific fix to our jail system that does not cost the taxpayers money, can be manned without an increase in personnel, meets judicial standards for separation, treatment, and safety, and can do so tomorrow rather than 6 years down the road.
Leadership without bluster, platitudes, and empty promises is what I am all for. Substituting the one for the other is what we have on a national scale. If that in fact works, why did we still have the incidents like the one you used to begin your letter.
Rich Bell
Polson
