Fond du Lac County Board gives go ahead to staff a dozen more patrol officers to the sheriff’s office over next three years

The Fond du Lac County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously in favor yesterday, to pass a joint resolution between the Finance Committee and the Public Safety Committee to add 12 patrol positions to the Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s Office over the next three years with three of them starting immediately.

The sheriff’s office has been working with the same amount of officers for at least the last 30 years, despite the number and severity of calls increasing over the same time period. Shifts have been working with only four officers and a shift supervisor to cover the entire county. A situation that stretches units very thin when a big call like a serious crash or weapons call comes in.

Fond du Lac County Sheriff Ryan Waldschmidt says the new positions were really needed saying over the past five years, the department has averaged 33,000 calls per year which comes to one call every 16 minutes. Waldschmidt says this is not sustainable, safe, or in the best interest of the public or the officers.

When compared to other departments, it’s easy to see how understaffed the sheriff’s office is. Nationally, the county sheriff’s office average of sworn officers per 1000 people is 2.8. Fond du Lac County has 1.38 officers per 1000 people. Looking at that same average at a more local level, the sheriff’s office is dead last in Fond du Lac County behind the local police departments, and in the state, they fall near the bottom compared with other sheriff’s offices.

Waldschmidt says it would take 19 additional officers to bring the county up to match comparable sized counties in the state. He goes on to say when you don’t increase staffing for nearly 30 years, you get quite a ways behind and it takes quite a large jump to catch up.

Sheriff Waldschmidt says the economic burden will not be as significant as adding three new salaries to the budget due to changes in the school resource officer program which now has the schools paying for half of the three resource officers salaries, freeing up 1 and 1/2 salaries worth of money, as well as shared revenue funds coming from the state that are earmarked for public safety that will go towards the new positions.