Bookings at the Allegan County Sheriff’s Office and Corrections Center rose sharply in 2017.
Allegan County Sheriff Frank Baker said bookings rose nearly 11 percent between 2016 and 2017, rising to 5,507 from 4,970.
“Historically, we’ve been on an upslide,” Baker told Allegan County Board of Commissioners at their May 10 regular meeting during the department’s annual report. “It’s one of the things we’re trying to address in a variety of ways.”
The upslide appeared to have begun in 2011, after hitting a low in 2010 of just over 4,000.
He said that in no single month in 2017 had the jail inmate population been lower than its counterpart in 2016. It ended the year at 210 after starting the year at about 185. Last year was much more leveled out than 2016, when the monthly average population rose from approximately 150 all the way to just over 190.
Baker didn’t linger on those numbers too long, however. He said he had set out in his first year as sheriff with many objectives.
“We feel we have made great strides in accomplishing our goals,” he said.
Among those efforts were increasing use of inmate programs and reaching out more on Facebook.
“The inmate programs are very important to me,” Baker said. “What we’re doing with them while in our facility—I feel we have a chance to return them to the community in a better state than when they entered.”
He said seeing the various crews of inmates out working in the community had also saved the equivalent of 3,535 bed-nights, a 76-percent increase over 2016.
“We had crews helping with the Allegan Conservation District out in the forest,” Baker said. “When it was threatening to flood, we had the debt crew there bagging sand. There’s all the work with Forgotten Man Ministries. Our Female Re-entry Unit has been very successful.”
His department’s posts on Facebook have garnered both attention and helped in another goal.
“We had been wanting to increase our community involvement, and this has certainly done a bit of that,” Baker said. “We have well over 8,000 who follow our Facebook page.”
Other goals included restructuring the command staff into more of a ranked structure, improving supervision and communication within the department, increasing workforce diversity through recruitment, improving employee engagement and rewriting the department’s policies and procedures—the latter of which is still ongoing.
Other numbers he highlighted:
• The department had 21,722 calls for service in 2017, a 2.7 percent increase over 2016. He noted that staffing had been flat since 2012 at 52 while calls for service had increased steadily since 2014, when it was at approximately 17,000.
Of those 21,722 calls for service in 2017, 1,090 were reports of suspicious situations.
Other major categories of those calls: family disputes or civil matters, 911; non-aggravated assaults, 572; drunk or drugged driving, 467; drugs or larceny or theft, 486; stalking, 260; suicides and attempts, 223; burglary, 192; death investigations, 71; missing persons, 42.
In 2017, the department wrote 8,631 citations. Speeding tickets were by far the single biggest category of those, at 3,595.
Other highlights among the citations: license suspended, 775; no proof of insurance, 651; seat belt, 422; texting while driving, 229; and minor in possession of alcohol, 136.
“Looking to the future, we want to improve school safety,” Baker said, noting the initiative he announced last month would continue to keep deputies in schools whenever possible. “That’s so they’re interacting with students and staff. We’re also offering a youth police academy this summer, a one-week program at the sheriff’s office where juniors and seniors in high school will come, we’ll talk about with our staff about the mechanics of an arrest, patrol procedures, some criminal law stuff, how we process crime scenes—things that will open their eyes to criminal justice, which is part of our recruiting.”
He also wants to increase the use of the jail’s GED program, especially since it offers skilled trades training.
We’re providing them with work readiness training,” Baker said. “They get a certificate they can take to potential employers. Especially in the Holland area; they require that they have gone through this program before they can even apply.
“They learn to how to do a resume that explains that long gap while they were in our facility.”
As for challenges, he sees the need for more deputies.
“You saw trends in booking that you were higher,” Baker said. “The average population does seem to be increasing.”
He said the inmate programs will have to be expanded to accommodate that rising population.
“We may potentially need to increase staff in corrections,” Baker said. “And we talked about this a lot last year, but staffing in the detective bureau to reduce the case load for the detective assigned sexual assault cases, staffing for domestic violence investigator, staffing for conducting technology-based evidence recovery, and the trend of increasing call volumes over the last few years.”
He said that as more tickets were issued and more crimes investigated, staff was in court more testifying about that evidence, driving up overtime costs.
Contact Ryan Lewis at rmlewis@allegannews.com or (269) 673-5534.
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