With the year 2018 now in the rearview mirror, Dallas County Sheriff Chad Leonard looked back on a busy 365 days for his office.

Leonard says in the last year, the Sheriff’s Office received 17,139 calls for service, issued around 3,800 traffic citations, and conducted around 650 transports to and from various locations. However, he adds that those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg, as his department fulfilled obligations throughout the County, including in the dispatch center. “67,422 phone calls came into our center last year. And those calls are broke down into the fire departments that we dispatch for, the police departments that we dispatch for, and obviously for the Sheriff’s Office, whether it’s administration calls or civil calls or calls for service. So I think we can say that we were pretty busy last year!”

The Sheriff’s Office operates the dispatch for every city in Dallas County except for Perry and the cities in the Des Moines metro. Leonard says they actually had more calls in 2017 than in 2018, but still a much higher amount of calls than typical counties in Iowa. He says his office will likely remain busy throughout 2019, though once the law enforcement center is finished a lot will be taken off his plate. Leonard explains, that’s mostly due to there no longer being a necessity of weekly construction meetings for the center, as well as the elimination of transporting prisoners to other counties due to overcrowding.

To hear more from Leonard, listen to today’s Perry Fareway Let’s Talk Dallas County program on air and at RaccoonValleyRadio.com.