Eleven days after about 100 residents came together for a community meeting, four community representatives met with the Barry County Commission to seek solutions.
Donnie Stumpff, Brian Stehlik, Donald Craig and Phil Hutchens, representing the Citizens for Justice in Barry County, met with County Commissioners Steve. Blankenship, Gary Schad and Gene Robbins, as well as County Clerk Joyce Ennis, on Monday. Also attending the session was State Rep. Scott Cupps, R-Shell Knob, and Tabetha Cooper, manager of SWMO ReStore and Builds.
The meeting centered on ways to stem burglaries in Barry County, with the beginning of the discussion revolving heavily on deputy pay and attracting law enforcement officers.
“Getting quality candidates is tough,” Robbins said. “We don’t want to just hire anybody and have a bunch of Barney Fifes out there. We need to find quality people.”
We don’t get applications,” Schad said. “No one wants to be a cop. We are getting ready to implement a program to pay for someone to go through the academy, which costs about $8,600, and sign a three-year contract to work for Barry County. If they stay, that will stay paid, but if they leave, they would have to pay the $8,600 back in full.”
Robbins said for such a program, he would hope to see at least five applicants to allow for some screening and selection of the best candidate.
“We talked about doing this even before we passed the [law enforcement] sales tax, and in my opinion, I think we need to raise salaries even more,” he said.
Efforts thus far to attract deputies include changing the county requirement for residency, allowing a deputy to live up to 20 miles outside of the county lines, and offering 100 percent health insurance coverage, a value of about $8,000, compared to many other counties providing 80 or 60 percent. The county’s loss ratio has also fallen from over 100 percent two years ago to around 20 percent, which the commission said shows effective hiring and retention practices at the sheriff’s office.
Ennis said the forecasted 1/2-cent law enforcement sales tax revenue was budgeted in full, with a use tax portion added, for about $2.9 million for the sheriff’s office this year. She said any collection over that amount will roll into a reserve fund. At the time of budgeting, $50,000 was expected to roll over, but Ennis said looking at numbers now, she hopes to see closer to $100,000 or $150,000, or even more, in the reserve at year’s end.
At 75 percent through the fiscal year, the county has received 86.4 percent of projected sales tax revenue.
Schad said being the first full year of collection of that tax, the commission budgeted conservatively, with the intention this year to do more, possibly a 10-15 percent increase.
“The next budgeting session, we plan on budgeting more; we just couldn’t do it this year because we didn’t know how much sales ta we’d have,” he said. “Now, with a full year of collection, we can start to put more toward the sheriff’s office. That money is sitting there until the next budget session.”
Craig said another $500 or $1,000 into salaries would not be enough.
“We have to be more than competitive and have to pay for them,” he said. “We’ve got to take strong action.”
Schad said the commission may wince at a $50,000 salary recommendation, but the commissioners would consider it if it came across their desk in budgeting.
Commissioners also said the tax can support the prosecutor’s office, but this year, they could not put any law enforcement sales tax funds in the prosecutor’s budget.
When it came to salaries, Cupps offered a different opinion.
“Even if you pay $60,000, you won’t get any more deputies than what you can get now, and you’ll make other counties mad because they will have to raise them, too,” he said. “We’re offering $105,000 for Highway Patrol, and we can’t get anyone to come. The populace is tired of their stuff being taken, but I believe the sheriff is trying, and the prosecutor is trying.
“The sheriff and the commission have been working with me weekly.”
“What can we do to help?” Stumpff asked.
“I understand because I have lost saddles to theft and some other stuff, and if you have a business, keep things under lock and key,” Robbins said. “If you know anyone qualified to be a deputy, have them talk to [Sheriff] Danny [Boyd] because we need it.”
Stumpff said the group has met with Boyd and has his support for a community watch program, which he specified is not a vigilante organization. The program’s setup is unchanged from what was proposed at the Sept. 14 community meeting: a group of 4-6 individuals in each town, with one individual responsible for keeping authorities in the loop.
“We would do the community watch program until the money comes in and the sheriff can get more people,” Stumpff said.
“I think it should go on even after the sheriff’s office is fully staffed,” Robbins said.
Following budgeting and salary talks, Cupps took a larger role in the conversation as it shifted to the state-level efforts on crime deterrence.
Cupps, who was in Iowa at the time of the community meeting, said he was “grumpy” to have received so many calls asking why he was not at a meeting to which he was not invited, and on 24 hours notice.
“I’m also a little grumpy because for five years, I have been working with [an advanced monitoring company],” he said. “About 20 percent of people think if you steal on a regular basis, you need to be in jail. But, the reality is the data shows different. I call it a crime school because 80-95 percent of perpetual offenders are involved with drugs in some way. It’s drug-related, and when they get thrown in jail, they may know how to steal a saddle, but when they come out, they know how to steal cars and make meth. Jailing is not effective, according to the data.”
Cupps said if all who committed crimes were jailed, it would be logistically impossible to hold so many individuals at the same time.
“It’s not an expense issue, it’s more a societal issue of what percentage of the population will we have locked up,” he said. “About 60-70 percent of people believe in criminal justice reform and not locking people up for non-violent crimes.”
According to the website crimegrade. org, which uses data from multiple sources, including the FBI, Barry County is ranked a D+ for crime, putting it in the 25th percentile nationwide, meaning 75 percent of counties in the country have less crime.
For property crime specifically, Barry County is in the 18th percentile for safety, meaning 82 percent of average U.S. counties see less property crime. The property crime rate in Barry County is 31.74 per 1,000 residents during a standard year.
Stone County has a D- grade on the site, McDonald County has a B+ and Taney County has a D.
Hutchens said he felt county residents believe crime is worse here than in other rural counties in the state, but Cupps disagreed.
“Crime is a problem, but it’s not unique to Barry County,” Cupps said. “[The sheriff and prosecutor] are exponentially more adequate than other small counties in the state.”
Cupps told of an individual in Shell Knob he helped to overcome meth addiction, giving the person a job and having open dialogue about drug use.
“One thing he told me that stuck with me was that when you’re on meth, you feel like the things you are taking are yours,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s wrong, because it feels like you’re entitled to it.
“You can’t change the systematic problem without solving the drug problem, and with criminal justice reform, what options are available?”
Cupps said he has been working with a company that specializes in electronic monitoring, moving away from the traditional ankle monitor and toward a wrist monitor, which looks like a smart watch, that links with an app on the person’s phone and tracks their location and alerts if tampering occurs.
Cupps said pilot programs in the midwest have been successful at stemming repeat offenses, and the program in some areas has options to report thefts anonymously and be paid to do so, further reducing property crime rates.
“The problem with this is, especially down in Shell Knob, is usually when I have something stolen, it’s in Stone County,” he said. “If we have a system this robust, it needs to be regional. I feel like it could be a game-changer. Telling the prosecutor to lock people up and throw away the key is not effective.”
Cupps also pointed to the Clark Center as a unique benefit in Barry County, saying most other counties do not have a similar resource.
After a 90-minute discussion, Stumpff said he did not expect for the community meeting to become as big a conversation as it had, but he was glad to bring awareness to people’s issues.
“Our families go back 100 years here, and I know we can’t stop it all, but if we don’t stand up and try to help, it won’t change,” he said.
“We can’t stop it everywhere else, but we can get our house in order,” Stehlik said.
Commissioners encouraged the group to work with Boyd in forming community watch groups.
