The LIVING Interview (continued) ...continued from page 25 because we stuck to the values. I think people are hungry for people with convictions and values in this country. After all, when you think of Americans and America, that’s what you think of, and I feel like I best embodied that – the values, the convictions that people were looking for, and the freedoms and the constitution. Those are the things that we stuck to the whole time, and I think that the results show that’s what people were really hungry for. GC LIVING: So let’s circle back to the previous question and how that answer ties in with the challenges facing law enforcement here in Pinal County. So here we have problems with illegal immigration, drugs and sex trafficking. How can we change the perception of law enforcement to a positive here in Pinal County? SHERIFF LAMB: That’s a great question. And
36
OR LI GOLDEN CORRID CORRIDOR LIV VING ING • THE INTERV IE W
one of the things that I’ve said all along in the campaign and I continue to say is we, as law enforcement, need to bring the humanity back to law enforcement. I want to focus on that. I believe in empowering our deputies to do their jobs, and then empowering them to trust in doing what’s right. I have a little patch that we have on our shirts, which by the way, we didn’t want to spend the money to get new shirts, so we had a patch made to cover the old Sheriff’s name on the shirts. The patch says, “Fear not. Do right.” And I think, in law enforcement, we need to just condition these guys to get back to just doing what’s right and really being part of the community and playing a role in the community. And I think, as we do that, people will start to look at law enforcement a little bit different again – back to what it used to be. GC LIVING: So what are some of your shortterm and long-term goals for the department? SHERIFF LAMB: Short-term goals – and this actually turns into a long-term goal – but a short-term goal is morale issues. We want to make sure that we fix our morale issues, and I think we’re already working on that. We’ve got some budget issues that we’re working on. We’ve got some relationships that we’re strengthening or we’re restoring. In particular, there were some damaged relationships between the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office and the Pinal County Board of Supervisors, and so we’re working hard on our shortterm goals. We’re going to fix those issues. Long-term goals are that we want to continue to do what we need to do to maintain a good morale. We want to make sure that we can keep those deputies here that have the experience and not lose them to other agencies. We want to make sure that we can continue to provide a quality product to the people of Pinal County, and like I always say, provide a maximum return on investment on the county residents’ tax dollars. GC LIVING: There was a time, not too long ago, that the sheriff’s office took some pretty drastic budget cuts which reduced the number of staff, particularly in the jail. Is that something that you’re going to work on addressing as budgets become available from the board of supervisors? How do you plan on addressing staffing shortages as our
county continues to grow so rapidly? SHERIFF LAMB: The county has been absolutely amazing so far. We have been working hand-in- hand with both finance and the board of supervisors and the other agencies within the county, and they have been amazing working with us. There are some budget issues, but part of fixing that budget actually is putting more bodies on the job, so we reduce the amount of overtime that we’re paying. That can fix a lot of these issues, and so we are currently hiring deputies and we’re hiring detention officers. We’re working on trying to fix those issues already, and it’s only been a month. I think we were two weeks into it when we had already put out the word that we were hiring. GC LIVING: With the number of attacks on police in recent years, what do you plan to do, going forward, to help keep your deputies safe? SHERIFF LAMB: There are a lot of things. We’re going to continue to make sure that they have the proper equipment. I go back to what I just said. We’re hiring. That’s a big thing. We need to make sure that we’ve got enough bodies on the street. We’re not even at full capacity for what the board has approved us to hire. We’re 16 deputies short and we’re almost 20 detention officers short, so we’re working hard to get to that point of where we’ve already been approved. Also important is equipment, and one of the most important things is also training. GC LIVING: Well, you just touched on equipment. What are your thoughts on police body cams and dash cams? SHERIFF LAMB: I think that’s a big thing right now. There’s good and bad with it. I recognize those qualities, but we’re not in a position right now as a county. We just don’t have the funding. We’ve got a lot of other budget issues that we need to work through. We just recently met with ASU Police Department, as a matter of fact, and we talked about this. They were kind of at the forefront getting body cameras into a lot of these local agencies, and they were actually even at the forefront on a national level. The storage is extremely expensive for the data and for the video, and we’ve just got a lot of other issues within the county. We’ve got to dial in our budget first before we can
TRAVEL EDITION • SPRING 2017