Dear Editorial Board,
I appreciate the birthday present that you tried to hand me in your April 1 editorial. However, I don’t accept your characterizations. I dropped out of the Columbia County Sheriff’s race purely because of the Independent legal requirements. This was a law passed by the two major parties to preclude Independent candidates from being on the ballot. The citizens realize that this law is rigged against third parties.
Does anyone think that the Columbia County Sheriff shares the same challenges as the Richmond County Sheriff? One out of every five adults live in poverty in Richmond County. One out of three children is raised in poverty in Augusta. Columbia County has a strong executive government system. Richmond County has a weak executive system with ALL 10 of the Commissioners trying to run the government.
The Iron Triangle of the Columbia County elected officials, government officials and money people try to convince the citizens that the county is great because of them. They have it all twisted. Columbia County’s successes are driven by the citizens with higher incomes and in-tact families. If I’ve learned anything over 45 years, I know crime is correlated to socio-economics.
As the former Richmond County Sheriff’s Office chief deputy, I was, in fact, involved in decision making with the sheriff and leadership team. These are the facts. Our administration started in January 2013. Over the next 3-4 years, we lowered crime in almost every category. In fact, we had it down to decades lows. We were rewarded by the Commission who defunded us by 30 deputy positions. Even with these challenges, we still have maintained these crime reductions.
If you compare us to similar counties like Columbus-Muscogee and Macon-Bibb you will find even in gun crime where we have struggled, we are in better shape. When I last checked in 2022, we were in the mid-30s for homicides while Bibb had 73 and Muscogee had 102.
We have faced challenges at our jail over our 11 years We have submitted requests after requests for maintenance repairs at the jail usually behind at 300-400 items. If you look at all of our annual budgets, you will see that our requests for capital and jail maintenance items are frequently ignored.
Because our deputies are proactive, you’ve seen our average daily population go from 850 up to 1200 prisoners. Our maximum capacity is 1066 prisoners. This only exacerbates our maintenance issues. We recognized the overcrowding and requested jail expansion from the last two SPLOST projects, which were denied over a nine year period. After it became a life or death situation, the Commission recently funded another POD. This will take two or three years minimum to build.
Lastly, we are facing staffing issues like almost every agency in the U.S. If you check any similar agencies to RCSO you will find that they are down in staffing like us or worse. We have issues, but especially with the challenges we face, our leadership team handles them well. Our clearance rates which means catching bad guys is second to none.
I have monitored the three RCSO candidates since the campaign began, and they are all good men. What I have not heard is any higher level management or leadership experience. I have heard them diagnose problems just as I have above. However, I have heard little to no viable solutions.
I want it to be clear that I 100% support the sheriff. I have seen the challenges he is forced to face. Everyday, I had citizens tell me to let the sheriff know what a great job that he and the deputies are doing day in and day out.
Lastly, I would call on TAP to work with the Sheriff’s Office to address the issues that I’ve outlined above. There are a few media outlets that only resort to confirmation and negativity bias. Their insane hatred for the sheriff is based totally on personal animus and not the facts.
Best Regards,
Pat Clayton
Columbia County, Ga.
