Sheriff’s department ranks high compared to similar-sized counties
The Warren County Sheriff’s Department has far and away outperformed other sheriff’s departments of its size, according to a breakdown of law enforcement by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
Despite the achievements cited by the TBI, Sheriff Jackie Matheny is disputing some of the numbers in the report, saying they should be even higher.
The TBI information, compiled on all Tennessee law enforcement agencies for 2001, showed Warren County made four times the number of drug arrests than almost every county of similar size. According to the report, there were 229 drug arrests made by the sheriff’s department in 2001, with only Dickson County anywhere near the nursery capital with 129 arrests. Coffee County reported just 20 drug arrests, Cumberland County 65 and the much larger Putnam County had 84 drug arrests.
However, according to Matheny, the department made 449 drug arrests during 2001, a number which was sent to the TBI for its report.
“I think there’s still some bugs to be worked out to get everything uniform,” Matheny said of the report. “They said our drug numbers were right but then they shorted us by about 200 arrests. The same thing was true in burglary arrests, because we had several more than showed up on the report.”
If Matheny is correct, the department’s rate on crimes solved would be even higher than 49 percent, which outranked all counties of similar size in the state. The closest jurisdictions to Warren County were Lincoln and Franklin counties, each with 30 percent clearance rates and Putnam with 27 percent. Cumberland boasted an 8 percent clearance rate and Coffee County 12 percent.
With the higher clearance rate was a high arrest rate with 2,095 arrests reported during 2001. Putnam County, with a population just under double that of Warren County, had 2,675 arrests while Cumberland County had 1,584 and Dickson County 1,432.
On the other side of the coin, Warren County also had one of the higher crime rates with 1,163 offenses reported outside the city of McMinnville. Cumberland had 1,135 and Lincoln 904. However, Dickson County, with a population nearly identical to Warren County, had 1,908 offenses.
Just as was the case with the city of McMinnville’s assessment in the TBI study, the bad news was a stunningly high juvenile offender rate. The numbers for the Warren County Sheriff’s Department and McMinnville Police Department were done separately, with this story referring to the sheriff’s department statistics. The city’s stats were printed in an earlier edition.
Warren County’s juvenile offense rate was eight times higher than the next closest similar size county. There were 299 arrests of underage people in Warren County during 2001, with Bedford County ranking second with 41. Both Putnam and Cumberland County had 11 juvenile arrests.
In light of the revelation, Matheny said how the different counties report juvenile arrests may have some bearing on the total. Matheny also said the juvenile court here is more aggressive in addressing juvenile problems.
“Our juvenile court is proactive here,” Matheny said. “In some cases here, where a parent cannot handle a child, unruly petitions are taken on the child so the court can intervene and place restrictions on the child and get them into programs which may help their emotional or behavioral problems while they are young.
“It’s more an area of prevention and doesn’t necessarily mean the child is committing a criminal offense. We report these as juvenile petitions, in the cases of unruly petitions, and they are counted here, whereas in other places, they may not be added to the total.”
While juvenile cases were very high, Warren County was on the low end in the number of cases of domestic violence. Only neighboring Coffee County, with 52, was lower in similar sized counties as Warren County reported 98 domestic assault cases in 2001. Dickson outranked all medium-sized counties with 451 cases, following by Lincoln County with 151, Bedford County with 131 and Franklin County with 125.