As of this evening, Sergeant-Major Susan Durbin is Acting Chief-of-Staff of the Sheriff's Auxiliary as Captain Krista Haymes has gone on Non-Operational status. We will make permanent decisions regarding this position sometime after Apple Butter Makin' Days is over.
SGTMAJ Durbin has been the company Adjutant and senior NCO until today. She is therefore now in charge of the entire Personnel section. This will result in an opening in either the Adutant or Chief-of-Staff position post-October.
The Lawrence County Sheriff's Office will be hosting a Law Enforcement Academy running between now and July of 2015. Sheriff's Auxiliary volunteers will be participating directly in some of the instruction alongside future deputies in order to learn more about how the Sheriff's Office functions and in order to pick up skills relevant to our mission. As the academies are not hosted in Mount Vernon every year, this is an unusual opportunity for us to access this training.
The Commander of the Sheriff's Auxiliary, Eric Vought, will be giving a talk on Tuesday 2 September on the potential of Ebola and other disease threats, what the expected response would be in the case of a major pandemic, and what can be done in the community to make weathering such events easier. The talk will summarize current knowledge of Ebola, try to dispel unreasonable fears and yet take a no-nonsense approach to the dangers which might exist. If a pandemic occurred, what could you do to protect your family and help the community respond?
This last weekend (the 13th through 15th June), the Auxiliary completed an annual deployment exercise, testing its call-up system, check-in and staging, and then remaining in the field for 24 hours. During this time, we conducted nighttime cattle patrols and daylight reconnaissance covering over 200 square miles of Lawrence County.
The Auxiliary's first Weapon's Retention class was held today at the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in Mount Vernon. Volunteers spent the morning learning about firearm safety in the home, in vehicles, and when carrying on the street. They got time to practice trying to disarm each other and protect their weapons from being taken by an attacker. Whether or not we wear uniforms, if we own or carry weapons, we have an ethical responsibility to not let bad guys get them from us.
We have had several unplanned website outages in the past two weeks. In order to hopefully correct some of these issues, the hosting provider is going to migrate the site to a different server which may take several hours. The site will be taken down after midnight on 9 June and it will come back up in the early morning of 10 June. By scheduling it this way, the materials for the CLA-2 class on the 9th should be available through the class.
The Mount Vernon burglar alleged to be involved in a string of business break-ins was arrested according to an 18 March article on the front page of the Lawrence County Record (subscription required). The Sheriff's Auxiliary is thanked in that article for its service in helping to protect Mount Vernon businesses.
Over the last weekend, the Sheriff's Auxiliary has been working very closely with the Mount Vernon Police Department to provide supplementary night-time patrols to help protect area businesses. More than half of our volunteers took time out of their weekend to deploy in the middle of the night and patrol or sit in unmarked vehicles in addition to the staff overhead of planning, coordinating, and equipping patrols (plus filing paperwork). We intend to continue working with the MVPD to supplement their manpower for night-time patrols for the forseeable future.
The Sheriff's Auxiliary completed it's first round of patrols to protect against livestock theft in the early morning hours of 16 February. The 16th was a full moon, which is a hig-risk period for rustling. Volunteers, coordinating with County Dispatch, spent four hours covering approximately 100 square miles of northwest Lawrence County. The Livestock Patrol program allows the Sheriff's Office to more effectively use limited numbers of deputies in the late night and early morning.
