Community Involvement

When elected I will be implementing a program in which the Criminal Division will become more involved with the communities in which they work.  Madison County will be divided up into districts (for the purpose of the program only).  Each deputy will be assigned a rotating district for a set amount of time.  The Deputies will spend a part of the patrol time (when coverage permits) contacting citizens and getting to know citizens personally.  This interaction will be the forefront to the deputies becoming more engaged and dedicated towards working in partnership with the members of our community in anticipating and preventing problems and to improving the quality of life for our counties residents and visitors.  This allows for deputies to become familiar and help resolve a host of crime and social related problems.

This program will be working in conjunction with Neighborhood Watch, Mcgruff, Child Identification and after school programs.  These programs empower citizens and our youth to work with us to make measured results in lower crime rates.

This program will focus on close, mutually beneficial ties between the Sheriff’s Office and community members.  At the center of community policing are three essential and complementary core components:

Partnerships between the Sheriff’s Office and the community

Problem Solving as a method to identify and solve problems of concern to the community

Change Management within the Sheriff’s Office organization to accommodate increased community involvement.

This is not just the standard Kaminsky FTO program that the Sheriff’s Office currently uses.  I will reevaluate the training budget and the practice of using the money for trips to Boise and elsewhere for deputies to attend redundant training with the same topics.  We will better utilize the tax payer’s money to train deputies to give something back to the community.

 

Citizens Academy

 We will not just have a citizen’s academy in which we educate people on what the office does.  We will recruit, educate and then ask those who wish to help stay on board and assist with our community policing programs.  We will not just run one here and there.  We will be dedicated to having one each year if not more.  This program can be expanded to encompass many valuable programs in conjunction with exciting community policing projects we will undertake as a sheriff’s office and community.    

 

Madison County Sheriff's Youth Camp

The Sheriff's office has a yearly summer youth camp.  This a wonderful program ran by many agencies across the country. My son attended it last year and could not wait to go back again. However I feel it needs to be expanded to follow the lead of such agencies as Bannock County in which we work with the Rexburg Police Department and other local agencies to hold a camp that is for at risk youth. Many of the children that attend the current camp are children of employees. We need to reach out to our youth and their parents. We need to use all of our resources through the cooperation of different agencies to identify and help youth who are struggling and need some positive direction. This is the type of program we will aggressively seek grant and local funding to accomplish our goals. At the end of the camp their needs to be follow up to assist those struggling youth in keeping the core values and strengths they gained keeping them on the correct path to success.

 

Youth Protection

I attended Jr. High and High School in Las Vegas. I saw firsthand the effects of violence, gangs, drugs and child abuse. I served three years as a resource officer in the Madison Jr. High School. I was the first officer to document and track Gang activity in our area. As a foster parent of ten years I have seen the devastating effects of child abuse, job loss and addiction. As a detective for 14 years these issues have been reinforced daily. I can assure you we have the same problems as all the larger cities; it is just on a smaller scale because of population and fortunately the great community we live in. However, things can get out of hand very quickly if we are complacent. We are not immune to the horrible problems brought on by addictions to drugs, alcohol and pornography. Our children are in a world of fast technology and communication. Never before have our children, been exposed to greater peer pressure. The use of cell phones, texting, I pads, notebooks and internet has opened the door to cyber bullying and every deviant predator imaginable. Make no mistake this behavior is fueled by the addiction and easy access of pornography and is simply one of the most dangerous threats we will face with raising our children. We need to attack this threat head on. I started and ran the Sheriff’s Office Facebook. I spent hundreds of hours on my own time making sure a large portion of our fan base and friends were youth from Madison County as well as the surrounding counties and school districts. I have already developed and presented training to community members and hundreds of children on the topic of internet safety. We will work with the school districts, health and welfare and the Family Crisis Center as well as all local and state agencies to pursue funding to take the fight for our children’s future front and center on all of these issues related to crimes against children and pornography addiction. The Sheriff’s office will become more involved with support of programs like juvenile jump court, stop short of addiction, mental health and drug court. If we fail our children, we have no future.

 

Citizens Advisory Committee

We will work with our local communities to create a citizens advisory committee. This committee will have a monthly meeting in which we will report to the committee on budget concerns, citizen needs, ideas and community problems. This is where we will open the budget up and show people what we are doing. This will be part of the commitment to having a real open door and transparency. We will seek advice from citizens who pay the taxes and our paychecks what they think in regards to big spending. This meeting is where we will develop monthly themes in which the sheriff’s office and community will work together for things such as implementing training and education on topics such as neighborhood watch, child identification, concealed carry training, self-defense, home preparedness, workplace violence, domestic violence, teen dating violence, internet safety and the dangers of pornography addiction. These community events will be advertised on Facebook, on our website, community interaction with the Deputies, community calendars and public service announcements. We will incorporate these ideas though block parties, the farmers market, bike rodeos, Boy Scout merit bagde clinics, church groups and after school programs. Because I have a goal of greatly improving the entire office morale, deputies will be encouraged to become merit badge councilors and get more involved with the Explorer Scout program and Eagle Scout projects, after school programs and youth sports. I have witnessed firsthand through the Grid Kid football program, youth soccer and baseball leagues, our children, especially the at risk youth, when are involved in these activities with positive encouragement/good role models, they will make better choices and will excel in community leadership and citizenship responsibility.

 

Adopt a School Deputy Program

In conjunction with the community watch/policing program I announced at the first of my campaign, I will also be adding the Adopt a School Deputy Program. After the county patrol deputies/detectives are assigned their neighborhood community policing and problem solving areas they will be assigned a school within Madison County School district and Sugar Salem School district. I fully believe the safety and security of schools rests upon the Sheriff’s office in cooperation with the Rexburg Police Department and the many other law enforcement agencies and resources we have available. We will work within the budget and as timely as we can to rotate the fiscal responsibility of school security back to the Sheriff’s Office. Sugar Salem School district can spend their budget money on a school teacher, facility maintenance or supplies for education. This is part of my promise to do more with less, because it is our job. The assigned deputy will visit the schools during his patrol times and do a walk through interacting with students and staff when appropriate as to not disrupt the educational process. The deputy will work with the school administration in the same manner as the community policing and neighborhood problem solving model. The deputies will set up times to give short presentations on subjects such as internet safety, stranger danger and anti-bulling presentations. We will work with the citizen advisory committee as well as the school districts to insure the content of the presentations is appropriate for the age groups they are being given to. These short presentations will be designed to complement the DARE program and reinforce values already being taught by good parenting and role models. The deputies will work with the schools to help with safety and lock down procedures in the event of a serious crisis. Because I believe in being a working Sheriff, I will also be taking a neighborhood area as well as a school responsibility. I have been giving these types of presentations over my entire career and have seen the value and importance of community policing and giving children the sense that we are truly there to serve and protect them and their families.

 

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.

 

Communication

I was the Sheriff’s Office public information officer for over five years. During that time I learned many great lessons in dealing with the media and the public. I believe we need to get critical information out to the public as quick as we can. This is a delicate balance of keeping the integrity of our investigations while insuring public safety. One of the ways we can effectively do this is through social media. Most teenagers are technically savvy and all most everyone in the community use some form of electronic communication through cell phones, texting, as well as social media such as Facebook and Twitter. I have been at the forefront of community involvement throughout my career. In 2010 I started the Sheriff’s Office Facebook page. We were one of the first agencies in Idaho to do this. In order to get the project going I spent hundreds of hours over four months of my own time, adding friends and getting the message out. We reached 5000 friends within the first few months and had to add a fan page so we could reach more people. I spent a great deal of time updating and getting out helpful and critical information to the citizens in our county as well as surrounding counties. When elected your working Sheriff I will keep my promise of Accountability, Commitment and Transparency to the public. We will use all the forms of communication available, to interact with the community and work within the community policing model to insure cooperation and public safety.

 

Animal Control

During the May Primary Election in response to a question from the media about what is one of the biggest issues we need to tackle in Madison County, Roy Klingler stated, “We have to do something about our animal control issues, dogs, cats other stray animals throughout the county. We have very little means right now…. Um… we really don’t have a good plan in place of how we deal with them. So, that is something we know is immediately…you know, evident we’ve got to work on.”

I spoke with many people who were taken back by this comment. I agree with them because after working for Madison County for over 18 years, I have seen the criminal case loads that we have had. As long as there is multiple child abuse cases each month, farm after farm being burglarized and many other crimes happening, animal control is not the biggest problem. However, it is still an ongoing problem. That statement Roy made does not make citizens feel like everything is going great. The Sheriff has had 12 years to do something with animal control.

'We don’t have the means', is an failed excuse. Sheriff Klingler has spent well over a million dollars on employee loss, and hundreds of thousands of tax payers’ money on buildings, vehicles and redundant training. He has talked about all the 'numerous grants' they have received and yet there has been no attempt to seek funding for an animal shelter or to sit down and resolve whatever issue is preventing a working contract with the Police Department or local agencies. The animal control problem is a community problem.

My promise is to use whatever funds we have available (there is funding) as a priority to help resolve the animal control issues. We will be at the forefront of community education on these issues through community policing, community input, public events and public service announcements. We will use the Inmate work detail, and court ordered community service programs (within the proper policies and laws) for the care and maintenance of the animals at the animal shelter, if needed. We will work with the Humane Society and well as Four Paws Adoption to assist wherever we can. We will no longer tell citizens we are unable to respond to deal with animal problems. Shooting an animal is not an acceptable practice anymore.

My promise is to serve and protect the community concerning problem animals, neglected, abused and dangerous animals. We will also enforce the county ordinances and the State of Idaho Animal Laws. We will implement the following plan in dealing with animal control:

• Impound stray animals and attempt to locate owners

• Rescue sick/injured animals

• Control vicious animals

• Quarantine sick or vicious animals after human injury

• Investigate cruelty and neglect

• Provide education and training to the community

• Quickly pick up dead animals on roadways

• Provide trapping information and assistance

• Loan humane trapping equipment

• Assist the Rexburg Police department and local animal shelters with adoptions

• Insure we carry out certified, safe and humane practices when we are forced to euthanize animals.

We will continuously seek the public’s input regarding responsible pet ownership and enforcing the animal ordinances and laws. We will conduct training and education about animal issues through the implemented Community Policing areas, the Citizen Advisory committee and available public forums and events.

We will seek community assistance such as volunteers to assist with operations by taking the animals for walks, giving the animal’s personal attention and assisting with the adoption process.