Town aldermen have agreed to hire a new police officer.
Officials hired Coyle Olsen, a part-time deputy patrol officer with the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office. Olsen also works as a full-time public safety dispatcher in Clay County. He will remain in both of those roles until paperwork transferring him to the Andrews Police Department is complete.
Olsen is the second officer hired by the Town of Andrews in as many weeks, as Sheriff Derrick Palmer works to rebuild the department following the resignation of former police chief Michael Hobgood. Andrews aldermen hired former Graham County sheriff Joseph Jones to be a town officer last month.
At the Aug. 3 meeting to hire Olsen, Palmer said he anticipates having new policies and procedures for the town’s police department drafted soon. The manual in use today is several hundred pages long and dictates many unrealistic procedures. Since taking over, Palmer has reached out to other municipal law enforcement agencies to review their policy and procedure manuals in order to find areas Andrews can adopt and modify for its department.
Palmer has also discovered that Andrews police have not been sending crime reports to the State Bureau of Investigation. The state requires local law enforcement agencies to submit crime reports to the SBI, which compiles the data for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
State and federal officials use the statistics to create a Uniform Crime Report and the National Incident-Based Reporting System. Those reports are often used by journalists and researchers to better understand crime trends in specific areas.
“You don’t get fined or anything like that for not reporting [to the state], you just miss out on opportunities,” Palmer said. “It can cause an issue with funding. If you’re having a drug problem and there’s a grant to combat drug issues, you might not get the money if you’re not reporting to the state.”
While it’s unclear why Andrews police stopped reporting crime to the state, Palmer said the issue dates back more than a year.
“Andrews has not reported since February 2019,” he said.
Since the computer system requires crime reports to be validated and submitted in chronological order, Palmer finds himself in an impossible position. He cannot validate reports about crimes that he did not investigate. Even if he could, it would take about 17 months to validate and submit reports dating back to February of last year.
He has communicated with state officials and the software company used to submit crime reports. It seems like there are only two viable options to move forward.
“Basically, February 2019 until now would go unreported, and the software company would reset our reporting so we could start from August, or we would just not report forever,” Palmer said. “But we would need approval from the state to do either option.”
When asked whether the failure to report crimes to the state affected criminal prosecution, he said it depends on “whether the report was filed correctly” at the local level.
“The only way it might affect a court case is if information was incomplete in that report,” Palmer said. “An unvalidated report doesn’t mean they don’t have enough information to prosecute.”
District Attorney Ashley Welch echoed those
comments.
“Not reporting to NIBRS doesn’t affect prosecutions, but if we do not get a report from law enforcement we can’t prosecute,” she said. “They could give us reports and not report to NIBRS, and we could still prosecute.”
While Palmer awaits word from state officials on how to move forward, he’s continuing to show bad actors that police are committed to protecting and serving the citizens of Andrews.
“Between the sheriff’s office and APD, we’ve done about 1,100 actions in Andrews [over the past month], which includes everything from security checks to overdose calls, arrests, and traffic stops,” he said.
“We can already see a visible difference on the town’s streets. Last week, I had three different drug people tell me they didn’t like Andrews anymore, and they were leaving to go to Marble.”