When Andy Pernsteiner was appointed as interim sheriff of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office on Feb. 24, he stated that he sees the department’s most significant challenge as staffing.

As Persteiner runs unopposed, on this fall’s general election ballot, to be retained as sheriff, he noted that the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office was fully staffed as of August, making it one of the few sheriff’s departments on the peninsula to achieve full staffing.

“The patrol side of our department has been fully staffed for several years,” Pernsteiner said. “Keeping the corrections side fully staffed has been more of a challenge, and not just for us, but for sheriff’s departments across the state.”

According to Pernsteiner, corrections positions are often seen as “stepping stones” in law enforcement careers, especially with a number of other law enforcement agencies in the state offering generous signing bonuses.

“Staffing will always be a concern for me, because our department is relatively small to begin with,” Pernsteiner said. “It would only take us losing a few folks for our remaining personnel to find themselves tasked with the sort of mandatory overtime that’s not uncommon among other law enforcement agencies.”

Pernsteiner explained that the typical window between hiring a prospective patrol officer off the street and having them ready to work duty shifts is roughly a year at least, “so we need to stay ahead of the curve, so we don’t wind up working ridiculous hours.”

Another priority of Pernsteiners is addressing the unhoused population in Jefferson County, although he emphasized that he sees the sheriff’s office as but one component of any potential solution, all of which he believes will require teamwork between multiple partnering agencies, spanning state and local government, as well as the community.

“I want to continue to build our department’s relationships with other groups to find a solution,” Pernsteiner said. “I’ve worked and lived here for 27 years. My wife and kids were born and raised here. When I go out for dinner at night, people come to me with their problems, and I try to fix what I can. When people call me, I return their calls. I’m just trying to help my community.”

As far as Pernsteiner is concerned, part of helping his community is making sure the sheriff’s department has qualified personnel, doing work that needs to be done, and to which they’re well-suited.

“I try to find the right people to do the right jobs, and then, I let them work,” Pernsteiner said. “I want them to be in the right positions to flourish.”

To that end, Pernsteiner would like to see his patrol deputies make contact with residents of the districts that fall under their purview, to get a ground-level sense of the specific issues that are of greatest concern to each district’s residents, whether it’s speeding or theft or other crimes, rather than just responding to calls as they come in.

“We always want to serve the community better,” Pernsteiner said. “And you can’t do that by simply continuing to do what you’ve always done. There’s no one magic bullet that’s going to fix everything. Whatever solutions we arrive at will come from communities coming together, and to do that, we want them to know and trust their local law enforcement.”

Pernsteiner acknowledged that one increasingly prevalent category of crime takes advantage of people’s trust, as fraud and scam calls to the sheriff’s office have become more common.

“We’ve seen quite the uptick in phishing emails and the like, so we’ve partnered with banks to address this,” Pernsteiner said. “We’re also working on presenting information to the public, to avoid them getting taken in by such scams.”