Richmond County Sheriff’s Office calls on community amid deputy shortage
AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - In an urgent call to the community, Richmond County Sheriff’s Office says there is a deputy shortage, and your help is needed to keep the community safe.
The agency just released a crime report for Sheriff Eugene Brantley’s first 130 days in office, showing a 25% overall crime decrease from January through May 10.
There’s a deputy shortage across the country right now.
Communities large and small are feeling the impacts of this shortage, including right here at home.
“With COVID, it sort of hurt us. And I hate to say it, but with the people looking for jobs today, they want to work remote. You can’t be a police officer and work remote,” said Lt. Mark Chestang.
Richmond County deputies on Friday arrested the third suspect in a murder that happened three years ago in Augusta.
Ricardo Daggett, 21, has been arrested in connection with the murder of 46-year-old Ahmed Jabari Hill Sr. on Tullocks Hill Drive.
Chestang is in charge of recruiting for the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office.
He says staffing-wise, they’re in a better spot than last year, and having a new istration has played a large role in that.
But, he says, during COVID, that’s when they really started to see a dent in staffing.
Since then, it’s been hard to recover.
”We’ll try to really preach the togetherness of the sheriff’s office because whether people really believe it or not, there’s just extreme amounts of camaraderie. Here we are a family, and believe me that that can make the difference in a job. It’s how you work with your other people,” said Chestang.
Despite not having as many deputies as they’d like, crime rates are still down compared to last year.
”The more people you have on the street interacting with the community, even making traffic stops because you catch them in the act, you actually help stop them before it even happens,” said Chestang.
Lieutenant Chestang says to continue reducing crime, the new istration is implementing new ideas and strategies, which require more hands on deck.
”This job can be dangerous. If this job was easy, everybody would do it. But with this job comes great rewards,” said Chestang.
Augusta-area kids collect change to help moms, babies in Africa
The money collected in the “Change for a Change” project will provide pre- and postnatal care for mothers and their babies in Sierra Leone.
Serving your community and making a difference.
”This job is about service to the public, so that’s if you don’t have that service attitude where you want to make your community better, then this isn’t the job for you, and I hate to say that because we want good people, but we also want the right people,” said Chestang.
“The way we work as a team, in different areas, are moving our teams to the hotspots to where you have the high crime areas, and really targeting and focusing our energy on that one spot. And like I said, that’s the istration coming up with that, and they’re pulling the resources to be able to do that, and that’s what makes it go,” said Chestang.
Chestang says they are always looking for good, certified deputies, so if you’re looking to make a difference in your community, he says this is the place to be.
“I’m not trying to go out and acquire deputies from other agencies in a way that upsets them, but a lot of times, a lot of these smaller agencies, they don’t have the opportunity or the job growth that we have here at the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office, we have tons of divisions, tons of upward movement,” said Chestang.
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