| Garfield County Sheriff's Criminal Interdiction Unit * Criminal Interdiction On Roads * * Warrant Service and Response * * Follow-up On Crimes * |
| Front row (left to right) K - 9 Deputy Logan Niles and his K - 9 partner Arco, Deputy Shawna Cornish, K - 9 Deputy Jon Marshall and his K - 9 partner Gigi, Back row (left to right) Deputy Brent Vaughn, Deputy Laura Roberts and Undersheriff Jerry Niles. Not pictured is Deputy Troy Bush. |
| A collaboration between K - 9 Deputy Logan Niles and Deputy Brent Vaughn led to the creation of the unit. The two conducted research on creating a specialized unit and sent a letter to Sheriff Bill Winchester proposing to create the unit. The Sheriff considered the proposal and the unit went into operation the first of September 2009. The seven member interdiction team focuses on the highways, roadways, Garfield County roads and conducting safety checkpoints throughout the county. Unit members search for violations of traffic laws and criminal activity as a by-product of those traffic stops. They have recovered narcotics, stolen property, firearms and made warrant arrests. Traffic enforcement focus of the unit is not an attempt to generate funds through writing more tickets. They give a lot of warnings at about the ratio is about 10 to 1 of warnings to tickets with most of the stops related to equipment malfunctions. Hoping to make more traffic stops to uncover other crimes. Some of the biggest crimes have been resolved by traffic stops. The second focus of the unit is major crime investigation and immediate follow - up and action on new cases. In September the team responded to a burglary and immediately began an intensified investigation. Within three hours of the reported burglary three arrests were made. Recovered stolen property and cleared up three other burglaries, two in the county and one in the city. Members of the unit are interviewing suspects already in custody on other crimes for additional information on unsolved crimes. Based upon the gathered information, members of the unit are conducting follow-ups based on new information making connections to other crimes. They use it in our investigations and are sharing that information with Enid Police Department and with other agencies if it is out of the county. The third focus of the unit is warrant service. We are working warrants as much as we can. We're also going back and trying to develop new information on old warrants for those who's moved out of Garfield County or out of the state. While working warrants service we've conducting search warrants and recovered over a pound of marijuana, stolen handguns and stolen body armor. Although the Garfield County Sheriff's Office is a small department the CIU will continue it's work. It's something we're going to continue to do. It does take away manpower that is needed for other operations. We have to do a review because we are such a small department. Members of the unit work dedicated schedules that change monthly. We're trying to step outside the box of what is normally part of routine patrol. We're freed up from doing all the things the regular deputies do. Members of the unit are not required to do prisoner transports, courthouse security or paper service for the courts. We're not tied up in the routine calls. There is a lot of things mandated by law that people don't consider that is part of the sheriff's office duty. However, the Members of the unit are required to fill their specialty roles within the sheriff's office. Those functions have not stopped and we're still doing those other functions. |
| Web site and some photos by Roger Parson Enid, Ok All photos and web pages are copyrighted by Roger Parson and the Garfield County Sheriff's Office 2009 |