Palmer keeps role in office
Murphy – It didn’t take long for Dustin Smith to see firsthand that a new sheriff’s time is in high demand from the community.
Smith, who was sworn in as Cherokee County sheriff on Dec. 5, said the first few weeks in his new role have lived up to the description he was given at sheriff’s leadership training. The job is a bit like “drinking from a fire hydrant on full blast” and involves a great deal of multitasking.
“There are a lot of people that want to specifically talk to the sheriff,” Smith said. “So, a lot of the day is spent just talking to people at a lot of different meetings.
“I made a joke to my wife and said now it seems like all I get done is going to different meetings. You are a law enforcement officer, but you’re more of a liaison between the agency and the public, so that’s a little bit different than any other law enforcement job I’ve ever done.”
However, Smith said he’s still managed to begin many of the changes he promised to implement during his campaign. That includes the establishment of a substation in Hiwassee Dam, which he expects will be ready by the end of January. Another substation, planned for Andrews, will exist inside the Andrews Police Department once that building’s remodeling work has been completed.
“We’ll have the county split into five zones,” Smith said. “The deputies within Zone 4 and Zone 1, on that end of the county they’ll have a place to put their lunch, use the restroom and a place to meet people.
“People can come to either one of those locations and file reports or meet deputies there, instead of having to come all the way to the sheriff’s office. That’s a huge thing for us if we’re out patrolling on either end of the county.”
Smith said he is working toward having five deputies on duty per shift, but how quickly that happens depends on staffing issues. He added that the office is losing one deputy due to medical issues, while another is leaving to return to school.
“My goal was to have detention officers that are certified also, one per shift, so they can serve warrants and we’re not pulling deputies off shifts to serve those warrants,” Smith said. “What we’re going to look to do is maybe pull from detention to the roads so we’re not having to go out and look for these people. If we can do that, we’ll have to refill back to detention.
“Losing two deputies will be hard, but we do have the applicants and we can pull from detention who are already certified.”
Certification is an important point for Smith. Although North Carolina sheriff’s offices are not required to hire officers who are already certified, Smith said he wants to deploy officers who have that training, either by hiring someone but not putting them to work until they’ve completed Basic Law Enforcement Training or by pulling from another law enforcement agency.
“In North Carolina, a sheriff’s office can hire someone and work them for up to a year before they have to go through BLET,” Smith said. “That’s a huge liability, because you’re telling someone to go out there without any training whatsoever.
“I do know that the sheriff’s association in North Carolina is looking to change that, probably within the next year or two. So, just like criminal justice standards, you would have to be certified before you actually started working, and that includes detention and a deputy on the road. It is getting harder now to hire people in law enforcement, it’s just harder to find people who want to do this job, so we’re having to find different ways to do that.”
Smith retained his predecessor, former sheriff Derrick Palmer, in a non-supervisory role that has Palmer taking walk-in reports and serving warrants at the detention center. The new sheriff said he also expects to use Palmer in some type of analyst capacity.
“One of the things we can do is go in and clean house,” Smith said. “But if you do have some certified officers that are willing to work, (that’s helpful because) we just don’t have the people willing to come in and work. It would be detrimental if we were to come in and get rid of a lot of different people, and didn’t have the people to replace them with.”
Smith said he intends to hold regular, possibly monthly meetings throughout communities within the county, depending on the type of turnout those sessions receive. He hopes county commissioners and town mayors will also make appearances.
“I just feel like it’s important to have that involvement with a community,” Smith said. “I’ve said this before, we can have radio shows and stuff like that, but we also want to make sure we’re getting the feedback with different communities, too, because each community is different. I just think it’s important that they see us and we hear what they’ve got to say.”