BY JIMMY LAWTON
North Country This Week

CANTON – Improving school safety, growing the drug task force and establishing a SWAT-style emergency response team are just a few of the ideas St. Lawrence County Undersheriff Sean O’Brien will push for if he's elected Sheriff.

O’Brien says he’ll also continue to protect Second Amendment rights, continue to increase transparency between the sheriff’s office and the public and continue to make improvements at the St. Lawrence County Correctional Facility.

O’Brien says that the narrative being pushed that he doesn’t support gun rights is simply off-base. He does not have a problem with people owning semi-automatic weapons, nor does he think they should require a permitting process, but he says law enforcement agencies don't write laws, they enforce them.

O’Brien pointed out the sheriff’s office worked to establish a pistol training program to improve access to ownership, only to have New York State step in and say they could no longer do it.

He said people are “frustrated” with state lawmakers and rightfully so.

Drug task force

While St. Lawrence County has been dealing with an opioid epidemic for years, things have grown worse since the pandemic with the proliferation of Fentanyl.

O’Brien said it’s a tough battle to fight for law enforcement, but said expanding the drug task force is at least one step in tackling the problem. 

“There is no cookie cutter answer because we’ve never dealt with this before,” he said.

While the Sheriff’s Office is the lead agency on the drug task force, nearly every law enforcement agency has contributing members who are deputized.

O’Brien says the drug task force has struggled as some local police departments have downsized in recent years.

O’Brien says he’d like to see a sheriff’s deputy available to back up local departments working cases as part of the task force.

He said having someone at the ready could significantly improve results when the timing is right. 

Public Safety

In O’Brien’s vision, working in conjunction with the drug task force would be the Threat Assessment Team. This would be a large group of community leaders such as superintendents, church leaders, college officials and department of social services.

O’Brien said the team is already in its infancy stage, with meetings being held since last June, but if elected he will work to ensure the resources are there to keep it going. The idea is to have as much information as possible so that vulnerabilities at locations with lots of people can be addressed and responses to incidents that might occur will be as efficient as possible.

“We're going to be bringing some more of the key players to the table and have a good conversation,” he said.

O’Brien pointed to the county’s school resource officer program which was implemented under the current administration as a point of success. The program allows schools willing to foot the bill to have a sheriff’s deputy in their district. 

O’Brien said that he’d like to see an SRO in each district that wants one. He also wants to find a way to make the program equitable for each school, as finances at each district differ greatly.

He said that he recognizes these are choices districts will need to make, but said that it's important enough that if a district wants an SRO, he’s going to find a way to make it happen.

He said SROs reduce response time in the event of an incident, build relationships with students and would be invaluable to the threat assessment team.

In terms of improving school and public safety though, O’Brien says the county also needs a true emergency response team. It would basically be a SWAT team. O’Brien says members would receive specialized training, specialized gear and be available at all times to respond to the worst situations.

He said that while some local police and sheriffs have specialized training like snipers for instance, the county doesn’t have a well-trained and outfitted entry team.

O’Brien said that the program will likely add to costs, but he’s hopeful St. Lawrence County’s drug dealers can help foot the bill through seizures.

O’Brien said that recent swatting incidents have raised public awareness and concern about potential threats at local schools. He said that while he hopes schools won’t ever be targets, he’d rather have the best tools in place and never use them than not have them when they are needed.

Administration

Running the Sheriff’s Office is a big job. Aside from the road patrol ,which includes nearly 40 personnel, and the corrections department, which includes about 80 employees, it also has a multi-million dollar budget.

O’Brien says as a business owner he knows how to manage a budget and make ends meet. He said his experience as Undersheriff has strengthened those abilities and fine tuned them for this particular operation.

He said that while overseeing people and watching numbers is important, so is knowing the various jobs of others. He said having worked his way up through the ranks he knows the situations and duties of each position and knows what they need to do to run smoothly.

In recent years O’Brien has been tasked with overseeing the jail. He said he’s already implemented a lot of changes there, largely due to changing state mandates.

O’Brien says that if elected he’ll ensure the right people are in the right places.

He pointed to the creation of the Chief Deputy, an administrative sheriff’s deputy job created to oversee the road patrol. He said this sort of action helps improve efficiency.

O’Brien says that currently the sheriff’s department has no openings and has added to the overall number of corrections officers in recent years and has added to the road patrol and SRO program.