POLSON – A new report issued by the Lake County Sheriff’s Office shows they were kept busy in 2017 with training and plenty of drug-related arrests.
Lake County Sheriff Don Bell says a great deal of focus was directed to on in-service training with the report showing that law enforcement spent 1,900 hours in 2017.
Additionally, several pounds of drugs — largely methamphetamine and heroin — were seized during the course of the year.
Sheriff Bell says they have had to be creative to function well within their budget and also anticipates more jail diversion efforts in the coming months. Those efforts began with a work detail available for low-level offenders to do community service type works in place of jail time.
“The sheriff work detail, we’ve had over 100 days worth of time worked off since we started it. I think it is going very well. The people will come in and I will talk to them, and they are very appreciative to get that off their mind," Sheriff Bell told MTN News.
He added that some people have waited years to be able to serve time in the Lake County jail.
Sheriff Bell says he hopes to get the jail to a place where non-violent offenders have more options to deal with serving their time outside of the jail, due to a high need for beds for violent offenders.
