Welcome to St. Mary's Today Online Edition!

By Kenneth C. Rossignol
ST. MARY'S TODAY

MONTREAL --- Sheriff Tim Cameron reports from the international COLEA conference in Montreal that the years long process to win approval for the St. Mary's Sheriff's Department has taken the final step with his appearance today before the conference committee and after all the reviews, inspections and submissions which have taken place for the past 5 years, St. Mary's County finally can claim a police agency which meets with high standards.

Gone are the days of Laurel and Hardy and Keystone Cops.

Those days of crime and police capers, which admittedly have been fun to cover were always a disappointment in that the citizens always got the short end of the stick for value of tax dollars when antics and silly politics from famous law officers such as 'Captain Chicken' Copado, and Lt. 'Stan Laurel' Voorhaar, along Lt. 'Oliver Hardy' Cooper were the order of the day.

We had great fun, such as a local female lawyer tossing a champagne bottle at one law officer's police car marking a bright spot in their romance, detectives watching seized home-made porn movies as entertainment and then the career ending episode of 'Where's the Loot', which saw an embarrassed Voorhaar decide not to run again as his department ran amuck with deputies stealing property from storage under the blessing of 'Captain Crook' Doolan.

How about the Hero of Hollywood, the man who, when his home was broken into again by Kevin and Skippy Guy, after a week-long stakeout by detectives, ran out of his house when his workshop was burgled by the Guy brothers, shooting at them with a .22 rifle as they tried to escape, and then wounding one of them but running out of bullets, wore out the rifle, breaking it to pieces as beat the bone-headed Guy into surrendering. The Guy boys had robbed nearly a hundred homes in Hollywood and had terrified old folks near to death and whatever prison term they got, the one time justice was administered, it was doled out that night.

The River Rats made fools out the the cops, which wasn't hard to do in the early nineties. The cops spent more time chasing fresh donuts and playing cop then actually being a cop. The River Rats were actually about three or four independent groups of crack-head white boys in Ridge, Hollywood and the Seventh District who operated by boat, breaking into occupied homes and then slipping away by water while the dumb cops showed up and brought out K-9 dogs and chased each other through the briars and woods while the laughing burglars quietly rowed down stream. Finally the cops figured it out but dealing with the lazy crab cops with guns was yet another story.

By the time the Natural Resources Police, who were working in those days and are now retired, would show up with a boat for another bash and dash burglary, the River Rats were long gone while the crab cops tried to figure out where to launch their boat.

Let's face it, we'll never have it this good again. We might have professionalism, proper respect for the public, hard working officers solving crime, good programs to control speeders, fight drugs and combat home burglaries, but we'll never have such variety in amusement from our police agency in the future.

Always on the sidelines of the police politics was the man who would one day be elected Sheriff and now he is in charge. Cameron spent his career advancing himself educationally, professionally and kept his approach to law enforcement friendly and efficient, excelling at any task to which he was assigned. It must have been tough being one of the few straight arrows, but Cameron was one of the few.

After four more years of the old school political network of law enforcement, last year the voters sent the then Sheriff David Zylak packing and by a large margin voted in Cameron.

Over the years, the various Sheriff's have all added something to the agency. Still living are former Sheriff's Ben Burroughs, Joe Lee Somerville and Wayne Pettit.   Of course, Voorhaar is alive, he just lives in West Virginia and
Zylak got a present from the county commissioners who gave him the 911 director job where he is making life miserable for the one guy who does the work, assistant 911 director Tim Bennett, to the point that insiders say Bennett is ready to leave.

Zylak has already proven he doesn't know what he is doing, He recently canned the computer tech who was mapping the county's secondary schools so that arriving medical and police personnel can have an inside map of the large rambling facilities and not be blindsided with unknown halls and doors if they have to work their way through a building during a hostage situation or other emergency.

The county had a grant for this work to be performed but Zylak, without checking with the school system or the commissioners, just canned the tech. He did so, as a political payback since the computer tech, Frank Marquart, was also the president of the FOP, just one of many groups which did not support Zylak in last year's election.

The one thing that can be said about Zylak's term as Sheriff is that he got the ball rolling for the COLEA accreditation. But remember, before patting him on the back, pat yourself on the back, because its been an expensive logistical process and cost a lot of tax money and you paid for it all.

Ben Burroughs was a tough law and order Sheriff of the old Southern school, Joe Lee Somerville brought fairness and seriousness to the agency, Wayne Pettit made the agency shipshape and professional for the first time, ending a time when most deputies guarding the jail at night simply slept in an empty cell. Voorhaar brought confusion, chaos and more colorful antics to his two terms, which we thank him for, over and over.