Marshall County Sheriff Matt Hassel provided the commissioners this week with a list of year-end statistics on the law enforcement aspect of the Marshall County Sheriff’s Department.
He said there are 16 uniformed officers when fully staffed for 24/7 coverage of the county’s 441 square miles and 10,000 miles of roads. Two officers are assigned to the Detective Bureau, one officer is assigned to the Marshall County Drug Task Force, and one officer oversees the jail and civilian staff.
Officers covered a total of 630 property damage crashes in 2020, 131 personal injury accidents and 7 fatal accidents, according to Sheriff Hassel.
“We made 1,886 traffic stops and wrote 779 tickets,” stated Hassel. “We investigated 781 calls of a possible drunk driver/impaired driver/reckless driver/unsafe/speeding driver/road rage, arrested 87 people for operating while intoxicated, we checked on 410 abandoned or disabled vehicles, and we responded to 72 vehicle slide-offs.”
Hassel added there were 52 assist another agency calls, dispatchers answered 84 911 hangups, officer investigated 32 burglary calls, 129 civil situations, 264 domestic disturbances, 145 harassment calls, and 124 juvenile complaints.
“We had 193 prisoner transports, 438 residential or business alarms, 278 security checks or open doors, 38 suicide/threat of suicide/homicide calls, 183 theft calls, 502 VIN checks, 93 warrant service, 255 welfare checks, and additional 337 miscellaneous calls.”
He said the department continues to keep busy.
“I’m very appreciative of my staff because they get the job done. I don’t have people calling me and saying ‘your officers didn’t show up’. We’ll call somebody out of bed to respond to those calls. I will also add that we went a month-and-a-half there when we were locked down with zero activity. So, there’s like two normal months kind of missing out of here.”
Additionally, the Drug Task Force conducted over 160 controlled buys and covert operations with $34,000 in transactions. Hassel noted in the report that some of the operations took down the largest suspected marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine dealers in the area. Drug Task Force officers were also instrumental in capturing a wanted person suspected for murder and a suspected child molester. The department also coordinated one of the county’s largest warrant sweep operations.
