By Kenneth C. Rossignol

ST. MARY’S TODAY

LA PLATA --- The opportunity to make a difference in the quality of life in Charles County is what keeps Rex Coffey focused on the job he never thought he would get, that of Sheriff.

After two unsuccessful tries for the chief law enforcement post in bustling county, Coffey won the election just about a year ago and immediately went to work putting his stamp on an organization that had been molded into one of the best in America by his predecessor, Fred Davis.

With the turnover in the elected office came a turnover in the command staff as a large number of senior officers in the agency decided to retire or, in some cases were advised that the option of retirement would be a good one to take.

Sheriff Coffey said that the turnover opened up new opportunities all through the rank structure and that retirements are a natural part of the scheme of life, along with the ability of a new broom to sweep clean.

“If you are and individual who is elected to a position it is expected that person is going to choose their own path and the bottom line is that my command staff does a tremendous job and brings a great deal of energy and experience to the agency,” said Sheriff Coffey.  “The changes made in the past year gave a lot of people a chance to move up and to serve.”

Leading his command staff, Coffey picked veteran commander Joe Montminy, promoted to the rank of major to supervise patrol and the detention center while he selected Mike Rackey as director of training, Buddy Gibson given the nod as a major in charge of administration; Jack Hurd as director of administrative services; Capt. Robert Cleaveland, Jr., in charge of Planning and Accreditation, Chaplain Services, the Cadet Program and the Criminal Justice Program.

Along with his selections to run the agency have come some complaints from retired officers in the agency that Gibson and Rackey carry weapons and drive police cars while not certified by the police training commission.  Coffey told ST. MARY’S TODAY that he and his choices for command staff went over in detail with a staffer at the commission the background and duties to be assigned to each person being selected by him for command posts and got an approval for the decisions in advance.

Coffey’s election and subsequent first year of operations of the 625-person agency have for the most part been routine but the trends in the challenges to law enforcement leave the veteran law officer worried.

As to dangerous Mexican gangs operating in Charles County, Coffey said, “the gang members we have there are the ones we put there.”

This summer the Charles Sheriff’s officers, with the assistance of Calvert, St. Mary’s and State Police pounced on a large group of sunning MS-13 gangsters at Rock Point where they had invaded a beach on the Wicomico River and made a large number of arrests.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service pays local jails around the nation to house prisoners and Charles County has approximately 65 of them in the La Plata Detention Center.

“They keep asking me to take more but my people warn against it,” said Coffey, “they come with their own special set of problems.”

“The per diem they pay is good but they are hard to manage,” said Coffey. “There are some programs to identify the gang members and we are working on a grant which will assist us with that.  We didn’t have any MS -13 until we locked them up. As for most of the Hispanic population of the county, they are generally easy to get along with and are not involved with serious crime, they are laid back, the serious crime is usually identified with the white and black populations. With the Hispanics its usually traffic violations and bad tags.”

“As for serious crime, we find that murders and rapes occur when people know each other unlike around the Northern Virginia and metropolitan area where it is strangers perpetrating these crimes,” said Sheriff Coffey.

The most prevalent crime in Charles County is theft and the Sheriff’s Department has been setting up sting operations to take a bite out of the crimes of opportunity.

“We took my pickup truck and put some firewood in the back, placed a new chain saw on top of the wood and set it up in the parking lot of the Bowling Alley on Acton Lane and set back to see who would take the bait,” said Coffey, noting that the location was selected due to a pattern of crimes in the area.  “We had a bunch of lookers but no takers, they kept coming up getting close.”

Another operation at the St. Charles Mall, where a small motorbike was left unattended was too much to resist for several local thieves who were quick to snatch the bait out of the trap set by the cops.

“We plan to have more than 50 officers deployed this Halloween to make the streets safe for the kids to get out and have fun and to cut down on vandalism,” said the Sheriff.  “We are working to cut down on street robberies in the Waldorf area and are deploying special units to fight that crime which hits working people the hardest.”

“As we move into the next month, a new amount of effort will be underway to protect our stores from robberies during the Christmas season,” said the Sheriff. “We already are getting back the word from the DC jail that the word is passed around up there to stay out of Charles County, that they take crime seriously down here, we mean to make those words come true.”

Coffey said that only 2 to 3 percent of the population turn out to be eligible to be hired as patrol officers due to the strict rules regarding prior drug use, as well as the keen competition that the availability of federal jobs do to shrink the labor pool.

“We have officers in the schools and one of the constant reminders that they give to the students who are 14 and 15 is to stay away from drugs, that drugs can have a serious affect on your ability to do many jobs and can block career paths, especially for law enforcement,” said Coffey. “Our officers can work as mentors in the schools and can make a big difference to keep kids from smoking pot, which remains the most serious drug, in terms of availability and the fact that today it is so much more potent than it was 30 years ago.”

Child abuse continues to be a serious part of the crime problem in Charles County with drugs at the root of most of those cases.

“Drugs really are the root of all evil,” said Coffey.  “We find so often that drug trafficking and drug abuse become generational.”

Coffey said that the job of Sheriff was one he tried hard to get and as soon as he was elected the first task he faced was a slowing economy, tough budget times and a requirement from the Charles Commissioners to cut the budget by $2 million.

“It was just my luck to have to do this job with less resources, but that’s the way it is and we got together, with Gloria Bowers, Buddy Gibson and Joe Montminy and we went over all the operations and made the cuts and during that effort we actually found some narcotics money for cameras we needed.

“The bottom line is that we will have the resources we need to protect the citizens and to serve them, I get phone calls from neighborhood associatons and people want crime in their neighborhoods taken care of and sometimes I hear from people who want to give up and move away.  I tell them to wait to give me a chance to fight back and keep this county from going down the drain, I know we can do it,” said Coffey.