Sheriff talks of changes and challenges

By Richard Shaw

Sheriff Jeff Wood looks at the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office as an agency that should serve the public, and in the five months since he was sworn in he has made many changes to reflect that.
“Look at the uniforms we are wearing now,” he said as he spoke to the Business Expansion and Retention group last Thursday morning. “Before they were black and kind of intimidating. Now they are tan and green. I think people feel more comfortable with this when deputies approach them.”
Wood, who was born in Moab but moved to Carbon County when he was two weeks old, is the son of a coal miner and a radio saleswoman.
Wood became a sheriff’s patrol deputy in 1992 along with working part time as a policeman in Helper. He then went on to work for Wellington as a police officer full time until 2001 when he joined Adult Probation and Parole. During the time he was with AP&P he also worked on the USU Eastern campus as an officer.
Once elected sheriff last November he determined that he felt the sheriff’s office was a little heavy on administration, so he took one lieutenants position and moved it to a patrol sergeant. He also changed personnel in his administration using a merit system.
Agricultural crime
He has also raised the number of detectives from two in the office to four, with one being an internet crime detective.
“One of the things I realized was that we have an awful lot of agricultural crime,” he said. “There is still a lot of cattle rustling going on, and although we don’t hang them anymore we want to catch them.”
He told the audience that the detectives are working hard with farmers and ranchers to help solve the crimes committed against them.
“We even have a case where we think one guy got mad at another and put weed seeds in his irrigation system so they would get into his certified hay,” stated Wood. “We are looking into that. We would not even have dealt with that before.”
But the war on drugs is one of his biggest concerns. He believes in the Drug Task Force, which is made up of officers from a number of different agencies.
“I have a philosophy of agressive enforcement, with prosecution and to get those involved incarcerated and to get them clean quickly,” he said.
Many tips come to the DTF through the detectives he has working for him. When asked about what percentage of the people in the county jail are there because of drugs or drug related crimes he answered “85 percent based on my experience and in my opinion.”
“We have had more activity in the drug enforcement area from January of this year until April than we did in the last three years combined,” he stated.
Safe Schools
The Sheriff then listed what he sees as priorities of his department.
First is safe schools.
“The schools in the county are all in incorporated areas,” he said. “But that doesn’t keep us from being involved. We do a lot of patrols at bus stops in the county and I have been having deputies walking through school so kids get used to seeing them and will talk to them,” he explained.
He said his deputies are also being familiarized with the buildings in case a SWAT team must be utilized at some point in the buildings.
“The fact is that training in schools should incorporate all agencies,” he said.
Second is that war on drugs he talked about earlier in the presentation.
“Carbon is listed as the number one county in the state that has problems with opiates,” he said. “Along with the DTF we are working to educate doctors and pharmacies about people who are shopping for doctors to prescribe drugs to them. It’s kind of funny having cops educate doctors, but many are not aware that some people shop all around the state for physicians who will prescribe. it is hard for doctors to know that someone may have seen a doctor upstate just a few days ago.”
He also pointed out how effective the drug court in the area has been. With the three trackers there and Four Corners Mental Health helping out, things have gone well.
“You can talk about those that have failed going through drug court, but we prefer to count the victories we have had.”
The third priority, he said is rural areas.
“We want to get to the outlying areas of the county more,” he said.”Some of the places we need to go can be a problem. Look at Nine Mile Canyon. Once you get about a mile past Soldier Creek Mine, you lose radio contact. That is rather concerning for a single officer to be in that canyon without any kind of backup. So we have started running patrols up there with two deputies in a vehicle. We also send them with satellite phones, and those work in most places there.”
Fourth, he wants the community to get more involved.
“We want to start Neighborhood Watch Programs and Farm and Ranch Watch Programs in the rural areas,” he said. “We need to take a proactive approach to public administration”
Changing gears a little, Wood said that he wants the Sheriff’s Office to be as transparent as possible.
“I’d like us to be as transparent as the cities in the county are,” he said. “We are striving for that by using social media, changing our image and by working toward getting more than one school resource officer in the school buildings.”
At present there is only one school resource officer and he is at Mont Harmon Middle School and is a Price City Officer.
He was asked by an audience member about a new jail, but he said that time has not come yet.
“Jails do wear out and buildings break down,” he said. “But we are not overcrowded nor are we at capacity. We can take up to 88 inmates, but we only have about 60 now.”
He said that if the area could change the way they handle cases the jail would not have overcrowding problems. That could be solved so that inmates would not have to be held in jail for initial appearances if the county had electronic monitoring equipment and parole officers.
“We are working toward that,” he said.
He also said that he has been working toward putting together an inmate work crew that could go out and do public projects. He pointed out that many inmates would much prefer working like that than being in the jail all day.
“We will be rolling that out in July,” he said.
Wood was also asked about the flooding last fall and what the Sheriff’s Department was going to prepare if that comes again.
“Well the county road department has been cleaning out canals which was some of the problem with some of the flooding last year,” he said. “We are also going to fly in a fixed wing aircraft down the river with a Go-Pro camera and see if we can spot places where there might be problems in the future. Of course doing anything on the river to fix things is problematic (because of federal laws governing water ways). But we are prepared for problems if they arise. Emergency Services Director Jason Llewelyn continues with his assistant to develop plans to meet the challenges.”