Cascade County Sheriff Discusses Law Enforcement Availability During Multiple Critical Incidents

This past weekend shook the community to its very core. As we all tried to make sense of the violence that took place, many of us are also reflecting on our first responders being stretched thin while they responded to not one, but two critical incidents.

I recently caught up with Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter and wanted to ask him about this potentially happening again in the midst of Great Falls growing and expanding.

Asking Sheriff Slaughter About Dealing with Multiple Incidents

One of the topics of discussion that arose from the two stabbings on Friday was first responders shifting to taking emergency only calls due to resources being needed at two separate but serious incidents.

I had Cascade County Sheriff Slaughter in-studio at 560 KMON and asked him point blank: what happens if there are multiple critical incidents taking place during the rapid growth of Great Falls?

Are first responders ready?

If you're interested, you can check out Sheriff Slaughter and I's full sit-down interview on the 560 KMON app or listen HERE.

Growth and Local Government Funding

Chris: How do you guys make adjustments based on those double, like a double incident on Friday, knowing that we're going to get bigger and there could be, let's say one night, God forbid, there's four incidents in an evening. Like, do you guys look at that and make adjustments based on these things that happened on Friday?

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Sheriff Slaughter: Well, two things, because you said a lot there. I'll break it down to two things. Number one, how do we deal with the growth and how do we like anticipate it? And the answer is you can't. And that's the thing that people in this community have to understand.

I am all for the amazing growth that's coming to Cascade County. I think it's everything that I've seen our economic leaders have done an amazing job getting the right type of growth to make our community prosper into the future. I think they've done an amazing job.

And I mean, hats off to our community, hats off to them, people who lead this whole economic thing. It's not my wheelhouse. I care about it, but it's not my wheelhouse.

So they're doing a great job. You know, and I'm really proud of our, I love Cascade County and I'm really proud of where we're going. But the reality of this is public safety does not, you can't anticipate and meet that need.

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It's impossible. And the reason you can't is because we're property tax funded. Local government is funded by property taxes.

That is the only tax that we have local control over. Okay. So this economy has to come in.

They have to build these big, huge warehouse businesses. Then their employees have to contact their builder and build a large home. And then they have like Janicki, for example, they have 2000 of those people building homes.

Well, then you multiply that factor of all those property taxes of all those homes, their property tax of that business. And then that's how the funding comes to government to be funded… so you can't do it.

This is the hard part for people to wrap their head around, but in Cascade County, a majority of the people don't want big government.

And that's one way you control the rate at which the government grows, is the economy has to grow first. And then the infrastructure of the government grows behind. It makes you feel when you're in government, it makes you feel like you're behind all the time.

But when I can't remember who broke this down for me years ago and explained it to me the way I'm explaining it to you. But then when I heard it, I was like, that makes sense. You know?

You have to have the funding to be able to do the things you got to do. Sometimes, levies, you can jumpstart that problem.

Sometimes you can, it just depends. You know, it's just difficult.

Managing Growth Risks and Major Incidents

Chris: It's kind of like the way I'm visualizing it. It's kind of like, you got, you only, you got to bite off what you can chew to a degree.

Sheriff Slaughter: And like, here's the problem. If you anticipate your economy is going to grow and it's going to be super big and you pass them a levy and then the economy doesn't grow to that scale. Well, now no one can afford their property taxes because the economy didn't grow.

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So it, you kind of have to be careful about it. It's a very big risk management game. And in government, you have to be responsible because you're playing with other people's money, right? So you got to be really savvy about it.

Now to the next part of your question, which I believe was, you know, you get a major incident that occurs and you kind of have to go to like, Hey, we're going to emergency calls only because all of our people are tied up. The secret to that is not to get siloed. 

Don't be caught in the silo of your own organization.

You know, for example, when Friday night, early Saturday morning kicked off, you know, we are, we're backfilling as the County, we're backfilling the city and taking calls where we're covering for them. We even called people in, like called people in on overtime. We're like, ‘Hey, the city's tied up.’

‘We got to take all the calls. Let's go take the calls and cover fill that.’

And we have to do more and more of that as law. We have to stop being so dependent upon what our organization could do.

And it's hard, right? Because you feel this duty to whatever your jurisdiction is that you're going to do a really good job of taking care of the said jurisdiction. Like that's my duty. I got to do that.

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So, but don't overextend yourself because guess what? Tomorrow the shifts start again. And if you've been working 16, 17 straight hours, you're worthless when you come back in and you turn it over in a couple hours sleep, right? So you, you have to, you have to spread it all out. And that's hard.

It takes a lot of leadership. It takes a lot of planning. It takes a lot of relationships and trust to be able to get to the point where you're comfortable going.

I'm going to have this other organization backfill our jurisdiction and cover us. But here's the thing that people don't care. I've never, I mean, I don't think citizens in our community care what color your uniform is or what badge you have.

If you show up when they call 911, they're just happy to see you. They're like, ‘thank you, take care of my problem,’ you know? And I think that that's the secret to that, you know, what do you do when your incidents are overrunning what you're doing? Well, you call on other people, you call for support, you call for help.

Chris: So as we continue to grow, what I'm hearing too from the first part of the question is we got to grow exponentially with what we're doing as far as the funding goes. Once we get the funding, we can do those things with law enforcement. And then on the back end of it, if we get a couple of growing pains where there's multiple incidents on a Saturday night and you guys are tied up, what I'm hearing is that the next man will step up.

Preparing, Training, and Supporting Each Other

Sheriff Slaughter: Like there will always be. Well, if that only occurs, if the leadership in law enforcement and government are you, you don't do this at the time. Oh, okay.

You plan for it. You train for it.

You've repped it before, you know? Yeah. If I told you to go bench press 400 pounds, I'm just going to jump in and do 400. 

You're not going to pull 400 pounds on it and bench press it the first time, right? You're going to work up to it. Well, that's what we've been doing over the past, you know, eight years we've been building that and working up towards it and building it, you know, and testing it. And you have growing pains with that, right?

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You have people that aren't in their jurisdiction, so they're not as fast on the orientation of where to go and what to do. So that slows things down for a second, but we help each other out. And then we have an amazing 911 dispatch center and the dispatchers get you where you're going.

Cause you're out of your realm, right?

Chris: You see those numbers that came out, it was like almost 1400 calls or something. It's insane.

Sheriff Slaughter: Yeah. It's a hard job too. It's that, and I'd say that in detention are probably the two hardest jobs in law enforcement, I believe hands down.