Governing Putnam County—Locally: Police

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The Banner Graphic and other news media across the U.S. frequently headline the detentions or arrests of individuals suspected of having committed crimes. In addition, this newspaper’s regularly appearing feature called the Putnam Scanner reports recent Greencastle Police Department arrests and traffic citations, as well as recent bookings in the Putnam County Jail.

Law enforcement is the very essence of what makes governments governments. Other important functions of governments that we have come to expect and value — roads and bridges, water and sewerage services, fire protection, public schools, land-use regulation, public libraries, parks, etc. — are not defining elements in the set of institutions that we know as “government.” But law enforcement is.

(If you wish to follow up on what I have just written about law enforcement being the essence of government, one good source is Max Weber, the widely respected late 19th/early 20th century observer of the ways that human societies are organized. If you have not previously heard of Max Weber, now you have.)

This column treats one critical component of law enforcement — police. And “police” includes law enforcement officers officially called “police” (like Greencastle police officers) as well as sheriffs/deputy sheriffs, marshals/deputy marshals and others who bear the responsibility for identifying and arresting those who engage in unlawful behaviors.

Our contemporary law enforcement process begins with the designation of certain behaviors as criminal (that is, forbidden). State legislatures overwhelmingly dominate this process, but their local government counterparts, such as city or town councils, also occasionally get into the act in relatively minor ways. For example, the City of Greencastle decided in March 2024 to allow UTVs on some streets in the city, but not others. Previously, these vehicles were forbidden on all city streets.

After forbidden behaviors are formally identified (for example, murder, assault, theft, vandalism and drunk driving), police, prosecutors, courts, juries, probation personnel and jails/prisons come into play in apprehending lawbreakers and subjecting them to consequences such as imprisonment or fines.

But make no mistake about it: It is police who operate on the front lines of the law enforcement process. And those front lines can, of course, be challenging places to be. Police are expected to operate in a fair and consistent manner, and sometimes need to make split-second decisions when human lives, including their own, are potentially at stake.

In the United States, all three levels of government operate and fund policing. The national government has its FBI and other law enforcement agencies, and our state has its Indiana State Police. Throughout Indiana, counties and municipalities have their own police.

The large majority of police officers in the United States are hired and funded by local governments. The extent of local government involvement in policing distinguishes the United States from most other countries in the world. Local governments play relatively small or no roles at all in funding and operating police in most countries (for example, Australia, France, Japan, India and the United Kingdom (England)). But in the United States, including our own Putnam County, local governments are front and center in providing police.

In the U.S. in 2018, there were about 800,000 police officers employed by roughly 17,500 different local governments (including sheriff’s departments associated with county governments). The comparable figures are about 60,000 state police and about 137,000 national government law enforcement personnel (including about 17,500 FBI agents and U.S. marshals). Thus, local governments provided roughly 80 percent of those working on the front lines of law enforcement in the United States.

The Putnam County Sheriff’s Office and the City of Greencastle’s police force are the two biggest police organizations in our county, with 22 and 17 full-time positions, respectively. Four of the five smaller municipalities in the county — the towns of Cloverdale, Roachdale, Bainbridge and Russellville — have (town) marshals who are full-fledged (i.e., “sworn”) police officers with full arrest powers. These four towns together employ the equivalent of about 10 full-time marshals/deputy marshals.

Cloverdale leads with five full-time law enforcement personnel, and Bainbridge and Roachdale have two full-time marshals each. Russellville has a marshal and three deputy marshals, all of whom are part-time and who also work for other police departments in the county. As of July 2022, the Town of Fillmore decided that it could no longer afford a town marshal, but reportedly hopes/plans to appoint a town marshal again sometime in the next year or two.

In addition to these local government police forces, Putnam County-based law enforcement agents include a contingent of state troopers headquartered in Putnamville. These District 53 Indiana State Police are responsible for covering six adjacent counties, including our own. Six of the approximately 44 District 53 state troopers are assigned to cover Putnam County.

Also there is the DePauw Police Department, which has seven “sworn” police officers with arrest powers identical to those of other police in the county. This apparent anomaly of a private university operating its own police department seems worth noting and pondering.

Leadership of the two largest police forces in Putnam County rests with Sheriff Jerrod Baugh and Greencastle Police Chief Chris Jones.

Sheriff Baugh was elected in 2022. He and other sheriffs in Indiana are elected to four-year terms and limited to two consecutive terms. Among other things, he is responsible for running the county jail, which serves all police organizations in the county and is not supposed to house more than 146 individuals at a given time.

The Greencastle police chief is appointed by the Greencastle mayor. Chief Jones was initially appointed by then-Mayor Bill Dory in December 2022, and his appointment was renewed by current mayor Lynda Dunbar early in 2024.

There are certainly many more important things about policing in particular and Putnam County law enforcement in general than could be treated in this overview. But the central role of Putnam County local governments in providing police to serve on the front lines of law enforcement, an essential government function, should be clear.