CITY POLICE AND COUNTY SHERIFFS CAUGHT FEUDING ON BODY CAM, PROVING YOU ARE YOUR OWN FIRST RESPONDER

CITY POLICE AND COUNTY SHERIFFS CAUGHT FEUDING ON BODY CAM, PROVING YOU ARE YOUR OWN FIRST RESPONDER!:

The Columbus, GA city police department and Muscogee county sheriff’s office disagreed over sting details before the July 16 dispute that sparked a standoff between officers and deputies at the County Jail.

Correspondence the Ledger-Enquirer obtained through an open records request included emails between Sheriff Greg Countryman and Police Chief Freddie Blackmon about jail overcrowding and poor communications related to special police operations.

The sheriff complained special crime details crowded the jail, where staff needed advance notice to prepare for an influx of inmates. When police did not call off a July 15 through July 17 operation coordinated with the Georgia State Patrol, despite the sheriff’s request, the jail run by the sheriff’s office changed the inmate booking order.

Instead of first come, first served, deputies’ prisoners were booked first, then state troopers’ and then police officers’.

When a deputy cut in front of police officers on July 16, a police patrol car blocked his car in, and a tense confrontation between deputies and police officers followed, prompting a supervisor to say, “I don’t want a fight.”

Changing the booking order was how the sheriff’s office dealt with police crime-suppression operations that the sheriff said worsened jail overcrowding when the facility was short staffed. The jail’s capacity is 1,069.

Countryman said the inmate population in July was well over that, rising to 1,123 after the July 4 weekend and hitting 1,111 in the days leading up to the July 15-17 crime-suppression detail.

The jail was also about 30 people short of a full staff, and the target capacity to fit the available personnel was not 1,069, but around 980, the sheriff said.

The sheriff said“I specifically spoke with Chief Blackmon in detail on July 6 regarding my concerns and the possible challenges we may face. I spoke with the mayor regarding the same on July 8. It was to no avail.”

Under normal circumstances, the jail can book a prisoner in 20 to 30 minutes. Police officers waited hours the night of July 15, when the jail booked deputies’ and troopers’ prisoners first.

The police department set up its own booking system for misdemeanor arrests then, because those suspects could be fingerprinted and released with a court summons — without going to jail.

But during that operation, some officers who weren’t involved in the detail took their prisoners to the jail, and the staff rejected them, saying the police department would handle their bookings.

When Blackmon complained the jail wouldn’t process the misdemeanor arrests made by beat officers, the sheriff shot back that he wasn’t given fair notice:

“Please do not give me instructions on how to process folks in our jail due to the lack of your communication... You know as well as I do, any operation of this magnitude should have included communication with the Jail Bureau.”

He later added: “The crux of the matter is, better communication could have made this much smoother on both ends. There was ample time to do so. You communicated with outside agencies and you failed to communicate with your partnering agency next door because, that was the plan in the first place.”

“They focused on targeted, known individuals who were either validated gang members or were considered armed and dangerous. They differ from the large-scale operations that I requested not to happen, during that specific time frame,” Countryman wrote in an email.

“The large-scale operations, like the one that the Columbus Police Department recently held, cast a wide net to make as many arrests as possible, utilizing traffic stops,” he added. “A sudden influx of 50-plus arrests versus four to six, can have a huge impact on an already overcrowded jail... If I can’t house inmates in the Muscogee County Jail, I am empowered to go look for other jails to house what we have. This is very expensive to the taxpayers.”

Countryman detailed the dangers of a crowded jail in his emailed response to the L-E:

“On any given day, we may have two sworn officers responsible for 60-80 inmates,” he wrote. “Their charges range from murder, aggravated assault, to child molestation. There are constant fights in the jail. We do random cell searches to find homemade shanks. Our deputies and correctional officers do not have weapons. Therefore, I have added K-9’s to the Jail Bureau to help with officer safety and inmate compliance.”

“When we accept arrestees in the jail, we accept the responsibility for caring for their pre-existing care. Medical inmate costs for taxpayers may exceed $50,000-$100,000 per inmate in some cases. There are many who do not understand the liability and the responsibility that comes with housing an inmate. We are the largest mental health facility within a 100-mile radius... The jail is a city within a city.”