QUESTION: Has the sheriff purged people from his agency’s list of certified officers because they supported either of his opponents in last month’s Republican primary?
ANSWER: What critics have characterized as a “purge” was more like spring cleaning according to the office of Alamance County’s sheriff, which regularly vets its inventory of certified officers to eliminate people who’ve died or moved on to other agencies.
Jackie Fortner, the chief deputy for sheriff Terry Johnson, notes that the sheriff’s office goes through this yearly housekeeping chore in order to maintain up-to-date certification records with the N.C. Sheriffs’ Training & Standards Division.
“I know everybody acts like it’s a political thing,” he added, “but we do this every year.”
This organizational housekeeping is ultimately done at the behest of the N.C. Sheriffs’ Education & Training Standards Commission – an appointed body that’s tasked with setting the professional standards for sheriff’s deputies, detention officers, and telecommunicators who work for the state’s 100 sheriffs.
According to the commission’s website, individual sheriffs are expected to send the training and standards division certain information that’s relevant to the certification of officers. These details include an officer’s designation as either full-time or reserve, their authorization to carry a weapon, and any change from active to inactive status.
In addition, the commission admonishes sheriffs to send in a “separation report” if an “officer leaves your agency, by retiring, resigning, dismissal, death, or at the sheriff’s discretion.” The commission stipulates that this form is only submitted if an officer actually leaves the agency – and not if they transition from full-time to reserve status or if their certification becomes inactive.
Montrese Dodson, the major over administration for Alamance County’s sheriff, conceded that officials in Raleigh have recently grown more demanding about the currency of the information they get from individual sheriffs.
“A few years ago, the training and standards division said we were holding certification for more than 400 people,” she recalled in an interview. “So, we went through our certification list and removed people who had passed away or moved on.”
Dodson said that she and her colleagues now go through this same exercise once a year to eliminate individuals who, for one reason or another, are no longer deemed to be in the agency’s ranks. The results are then sent to the training and standards division, which expects to have the new list in hand by January 31. Dodson added that, in the latest round of removals, she and her colleagues struck 12 individuals – although none of them were crossed off the list because they had died.
Mark Dockery, the sheriff’s captain over personnel, stresses that anyone who is culled from this list doesn’t necessarily lose their law enforcement certification as a result.
“The state says that you can hold onto your own certification for up to 12 months before it lapses,” he went on to explain, “and that gives you a year to find another agency.”
Since the process isn’t tantamount to decertification, the sheriff’s office does have some discretion in assembling its annual list. All the same, politics doesn’t enter into the decision – at least not according to Alamance County’s sheriff Terry Johnson, who successfully fended off two rivals during the GOP’s primary in March.
“Some of the people removed from that list were my supporters,” Johnson declared in an interview Tuesday.
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