Birmingham, Alabama — (June 6, 2019) Sheriff Mark Pettway is crediting his deputies and school resource officers for keeping Jefferson County schools safe in 2018 and 2019.
In a recently released report by the School Resource Division of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s office, SRO’s finished the year making 76 felony arrests, which included 17 terrorist threat investigations, 454 misdemeanor arrests, 83 traffic citations, and 2,009 traffic warnings.
“The fine work by our School Resources Division is why we need officers in our schools,” said Sheriff Mark Pettway. “Having our deputies onsite during school hours and at events, helps us keep the citizens of Jefferson County safe and with our eyes and ears we thwart any potential threat to our children including any potential terrorist activity.”
Additionally, deputies protected over 620,000 people at 20,435 events at schools and responded to nearly 4,000 calls. The SROs closed 1,551 cases last school year. The SROs go through extensive training, including Active Shooter training, “Too Good for Drugs” and “Gang Resistance Education Training” to learn how to deal with and protect our school children. This year alone they logged over 3,878 hours of training.
The division was created to keep Jefferson County Schools safe, and when Sheriff Pettway took office in January he increased the number of SROs to cover all schools in the County. The division is under the command of Captain Felicia Rucker, who has assigned 25 SRO’s, two sergeants and 37 contract SROs to keep 62 Jefferson County schools safe. The mission of these community-oriented deputies is to support safe, secure learning environments for students in grades K – 12.
SROs work to prevent violence in schools, to investigate and prosecute anyone who engages in crimes on school campuses. SROs are certified through the National Association of School Resource Officers at both the Basic and Advanced SRO certification levels.