Heroes who serve and protect

The public may not always realize it, but local law enforcement officers are on the job every day, working to make life safer for local residents, according to local law officials.
The Laclede County Sheriff’s Office, Lebanon Police Department and Missouri State Highway Patrol officials shared their perspectives on how they serve the public.
Law enforcement is always evolving, according to Laclede County Sheriff David Millsap.
“Its like any other business, if you don’t adapt and change to new technology and human resources, you fall behind,” he said. “We battle recruiting, trying to get good employees, we battle staying up with technology and it’s going to be a little harder for us a lot of time, because it’s based on the amount of funding we have to be able to stay on top of those types of things.”
Millsap said recruiting and retaining employees is always an issue, especially for a small agency.

“We’ve been very lucky that over the last three years we have been able to get quality people to come here to work and we’ve retained a lot of them,” he said. “We have lost some people who have gone on to other agencies because of money, but the County Commission has worked with us over the last couple of years to improve salaries so we’ve been able to retain a lot of people.”
Despite the national controversies currently raging about police actions, Millsap said police enjoy a great amount of support locally.


For more on this story see Saturday's LCR.