High Risk!
The Deschutes County Sheriff's Office breaks the county into four patrol districts: North district covering Redmond, Terrebonne and the surrounds; Local district covering Bend and the surrounds; South district covering La Pine and the surrounds; and West district covering sisters and surrounds.
That is a big geographic area covering around 3,055 square miles, much of it is wildernerss. However, there is still a very large area to patrol, and so it is important for deputies to have district partners who can help them in the event of a "hot call" or if they need cover due to an escalating situation. A good district partner will always know where their partner is located and will be ready to cover them in a time of need.
We were contacted by multiple sources within the Sheriff's Office and told that this past Saturday night, February 17, the patrol division was staffed by only FOUR deputies and a SINGLE sergeant. That's right four deputies and one supervisor to cover the whole county.
Specifically, we heard a single deputy was working the north district, a single deputy was working the south district and two deputies were working the local district. It appears the west district had no law enforcement coverage.
We also understand the unlucky sergeant on this team always supervises his team by himself; furthermore, his is the only team with a single sergeant with all other teams having two sergeants.
Now keep in mind this past weekend was a holiday weekend (President's Day) and WinterFest was also being hosted in Bend. Consequently there were a lot more people in town than usual and on top of that we were in the middle of a winter storm.
Importantly, since the beginning of 2023 the stated minimums for a patrol shift are EIGHT deputies and TWO supervisors. So the patrol team was operating at half of the MINIMUM staffing levels deemed safe by the Sheriff's Office patrol division leadership headed by captain William Bailey.
Why is this a terrible situation and universally considered to be very high risk? Here are a couple of examples to illustrate:
Consider the lone South District deputy making a traffic strop at 3am and arresting the driver because of an outstanding warrant (not an uncommon occurrence). That deputy would have to drive the arrestee to the County Jail in Bend. Imagine if while they are in Bend a high priority call for service to a physical domestic dispute comes out in the South District- again not uncommon. There would be no nearby law enforcement resources available to handle that call, and god forbid that the victim of the dispute is seriously assaulted or worse yet killed. Then what?
As another example, consider the fact that the lone deputy patrolling the north district would have to hope that Redmond Police or Oregon State Police (who are not available after 2am) would be able to provide an officer in the event of an emergency. Outside of that a deputy would have to rush from another district to provide cover. This could easily take over 30 minutes.
Folks put straightforwardly this is very dangerous for both the on duty deputies as well as for public safety, and we understand there is quite a lot of frustration and anger within the Sheriff's Office about it, and we believe rightfully so.
In fact we reached out to some of our law enforcement contacts and they were stunned by and initially disbelieving of what we told them. The universal comment was: That is dangerous.
This naturally begs the question: What in the heck is patrol division commander captain William Bailey thinking and how can he in good conscience expose the deputies under his command as well as the general public to such high risk?
To our minds, this is not only utterly unacceptable but it shows at best a total lack of management acumen and experience - after all Bailey barely had two years of experience as a lieutenant, with little of that in patrol, before his promotion to captain. At worst this is a complete dereliction of duty on Bailey's part.
Quite frankly, we think Bailey should focus a lot more on his job and a lot less on campaigning for Sheriff.
To make our point, we understand Bailey has resurrected the Community Action Target Team (CATT). This team was stood up over six years ago by Sheriff Shane Nelson. It's goal, in the words of then Public Information Officer William Bailey, was to target "quality of life" crimes such as distracted driving, illegal drugs, theft, trespassing and criminal mischief. (kbnd.com/kbnd-news/local-news-feed/372212).
Over the past six years CATT has been variously disbanded and reconstituted numerous times. In its most recent incarnation, Bailey has CATT tasked with traffic enforcement Mondays through Thursdays from 7am to 5pm. In the interest of time and space, we won't comment on this bizarre schedule.
CATT is headed by a sergeant who reports to Bailey. The sergeant has but a single deputy reporting to him.
Given the staffing crisis within the patrol division wouldn't the CATT sergeant be better utilized as a patrol sergeant - Perhaps by being assigned to the team stuck with only one full-time sergeant?
Wouldn't the sergeant's single reporting deputy be more useful ensuring the safety of their colleagues and community by working patrol rather than giving tickets to folks for failing to signal when exiting a roundabout?
We think the answers to these two questions are pretty self-evident.
Why then, at a time when the patrol division is understaffed did Bailey decide it would be a great idea to raise CATT like a phoenix from the ashes?
The answer to this question may well lay in a campaign email that Bailey sent out to supporters and potential supporters. (We provide a link to this email at the bottom of the article). In his email Bailey wrote:
"There's more traffic moving faster than ever in Deschutes County. I am standing up a team of deputies focused primarily on traffic enforcement so that we can keep our roads and highways safe. As Patrol Captain, I have been working over the last year to lay the groundwork for a Traffic Safety Team. This past month, I assigned a supervisor to oversee the team and I will have a full Traffic Safety Team on day one of my administration."
We think this is fundamentally about Bill Bailey's election run and at its heart the goal of the CATT team is not to mitigate traffic issues - after all how much can two staff members effectively do - but rather to provide statistics that Bailey can use in his campaign in an effort to show how he is diligently working on keeping the county's roads safe.
In other words it seems to us the CATT team being used for political showmanship by captain Bailey, and straightforwardly, we believe he is putting his political aspirations above the safety of both his deputies and the community which he claims to serve.
We won't bother going into the potential election law violations, not to mention Sheriff's Office policy violations, this behavior results in.
Ultimately, we think the Sheriff's Office patrol division is one critical incident away from disaster. We are not being hyperbolic, and we can think of at least two incidents in recents months where disaster was barely averted
We hope and pray that the fates keep smiling on the men and women of the Sheriff's Office who dutifully serve our community on a daily basis. Goodness knows the last thing we need in Deschutes County is a totally avoidable tragedy.
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William Bailey Letter to supporters and donors: http://www.dropbox.com/.../rlal1slf.../Issues-we-face.pdf...
