I have worked almost an entire career investigating major crimes.  A large share of these crimes have taken place in the rural and back country of Madison County and in the many business districts of our community.  I believe that the agriculture community and local business is the cornerstone to our economy.  Times are getting tougher and many who have embraced the entrepreneurship cannot afford to have a business loss as a result of criminal activity. I have spent thousands of hours over the years resolving crimes involving property damage, Grand theft, Burglary and the useless waste in shooting cattle for fun.   In the last several years we have seen an explosion in copper wire and metal thefts.  I have been instrumental in resolving these crimes and bringing convictions to the criminals that hurt our economy.  I have a proven track record of solving and managing an investigative division dealing with these types of property crimes and seeing the cases through to convictions with solid crime scene work and investigative techniques.

It is my belief that as this type of business is vital to our community, it deserves consistent police patrol. We need to build stronger partnerships with assisting agencies such as the Idaho State Police.  We should be welcoming their assistance in traffic control and accident reconstruction.  When ISP resident troopers feel comfortable in working in our area, we add to our man power.  We know the highways are being protected and drivers are safe.  This allows us to patrol the rural communities of Madison County and protect our economy from those who have no respect for other people’s property. Business door checks, rural community, farm and backcountry patrol will be our focus.  For those businesses in Rexburg we will continue to assist the city in the patrol of them on our way in and out of town taking different patrol routes to add that extra coverage and police presence.  I have several ideas and plans to work with the businesses and farming community in a cooperative partnership for crime prevention.  It is so true, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Operation ID

In conjunction with the community policing model and my promises to reengage the Sheriff’s office with the community, when elected, I will be implementing Operation ID.  This is a program that deals with property crimes.  We know we cannot be everywhere at once.  We know that there are times still, even with consistent and aggressive criminal patrol, people who have no respect for law abiding citizen’s property will commit crimes.  The first step for this program is education on the effects of property crimes and the many things we can do to prevent it.  We will be doing this through public service announcements, Facebook and the Sheriff’s Office web site.   You will then benefit from the interaction with the assigned deputy to the community policing district you live in.  Step two of the program is having the assigned deputy come to your home with an engraver.  This small tool can engrave an identification mark on your property.  This is especially handy for tools, bikes and farm equipment.   We can also take digital photographs of the identifying mark and make an electronic file for you to keep.   A large share of stolen property is pawned off, sold on web sites like KSL and Craig’s list.  We have a web based program that allows us to search for stolen items, however, without serial numbers or identification marks it is very difficult.   If you do not want your property marked, we can provide a premade form that you can fill out with your valuables in case of theft or fire.  This form will also be available in an electronic format.   We will attach the documents to our website for convenience.  Over the last 18 years of my career, we have had thousands of dollars of stolen property from up on the bench from our farms and throughout the county that has not been recovered because it was such a common item it was not identifiable by the owner.  This program will give us one more investigative tool to assist us in identifying criminals and the recovery of citizen’s stolen property.  This program would be cost free to the tax payer.