Former Graham sheriff promoted
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Andrews – What a year it has been for the Town of Andrews.
The Andrews Board of Aldermen voted Dec. 8 to appoint former Graham County sheriff Joseph Jones as the town’s new police chief.
Jones resigned as Graham County sheriff in June, citing personal reasons as the motivating factor, and joined the Andrews Police Department the following month. At that time, Cherokee County Sheriff Derrick Palmer had been running the town’s police department for a few weeks, following the resignation of former chief Michael Hobgood.
When asked by the Cherokee Scout in July whether joining the Andrews police force was a play to take over as chief, Jones replied, “No, sir. That definitely hasn’t been discussed.”
Things have changed since then.
“When I hired Joe Jones, it wasn’t for the purpose of him being chief. But since Joe has been there, he’s kind of assumed the unofficial investigator/assistant chief role,” Palmer told the Scout last week. “Joe knows what he’s doing.”
Palmer said he and the mayor had been discussing the possibility of handing over the role of police chief to Jones for the last few weeks after realizing it would take a larger commitment of time to complete the next “phase” of the department’s overhaul efforts.
“We’ve finally reached a place in Andrews where things are manageable,” Palmer said. “I’ve done what needs to be done up to this point without neglecting the duties
of sheriff. “But to step into phase two, it’s going to take someone 40 hours a week or more. If I did that, I may be stepping into a place that would be neglecting duties of the sheriff.”
Over the past six months, Palmer has hired two police officers for the town, including Jones, and recommended two others. He also developed a policy and procedure manual for the police department, which still needs to be adopted by the board after aldermen hire a new town attorney to replace Darryl Brown, who resigned Dec. 2.
Palmer also helped the town’s police department begin reporting crime data to the state in a timely manner. Andrews police had not been sending crime reports to the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation since February 2019. The data is used to create a Uniform Crime Report and the National Incident-Based Reporting System, both of which are often used to understand crime trends in specific areas.
Failure to report crime statistics to the state could have prevented the town from receiving grant money for criminal justice purposes. Instead of verifying every individual police report dating back to last year, Palmer convinced state officials to allow him to approve reports regarding major events before sending the rest of the data to the state for them to reconcile.
“We basically did a data dump,” Palmer said. “We sent everything to the state, whether they needed it or not, and let those guys sort through it all. Then I went back to January and updated all reports for this year.”
While community relations and the creation of watch programs should be on the list of goals for next year, Palmer said reorganization of the evidence room should be a top priority for Andrews police in 2021.
“Evidence needs to be reorganized, and they need to clear out old evidence from disposed cases,” Palmer said.
Although Palmer is officially handing over chief duties to Jones, he’s committed to being available to assist the town whenever needed.
“I made a commitment whether I was chief or not that as a sheriff’s department we were going to focus on Andrews to straighten things out,” Palmer said.
“That promise still exists. If Joe needs help, as a sheriff’s office we’re going to help him. We’re not going to let him fall.”
Jones’ salary is $55,000 per year. The department has four full-time officers, including Jones. Officer Jake Phillips, who used to work with Jones in Graham County, resigned last week. The town has the budget to hire three additional officers