Governing Putnam County—Locally: Police Again

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As a follow-up to my June 25 column overviewing all police forces in Putnam County, this column will focus on the three largest ones: The Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, the Greencastle Police Department and the DePauw University Police Department — with 23, 17 and seven “sworn officers,” respectively.

What’s a “sworn officer”? Someone who has the legal authority to make arrests and perform other related police activities. Depending on who employs them, “sworn officers” can be called “police officers,” “sheriffs/deputy sheriffs,” “marshals/deputy marshals” or “state troopers,” but the term “police” can be used to apply to all of them.

Current Putnam County Sheriff Jerrod Baugh has a lifetime history with Putnam County sheriffs and jails. His father was the county sheriff (1974-1982) when son Jerrod was 4 to 12 years old. During those years the family lived in the old Putnam County jail located just west of the courthouse (and the Buzz Bomb) on Washington Street. After college, Jerrod worked for 28 years as an Indiana excise police officer. Having run for sheriff in 2018 and lost, he ran again in 2022 and won. I expect that he will run for a second term in 2026.

Unlike the heads of the Greencastle Police Department and the DePauw Police Department, the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office is headed by an elected official whom no individual appoints and with no individual to whom he is a subordinate. Instead, the sheriff is one of relatively many elected officeholders in the county’s non-hierarchical structure. Besides seven members of the county council and three county commissioners, the auditor, treasurer, recorder, surveyor, county clerk, assessor, coroner and sheriff are all separately elected officeholders. And county voters also elect the prosecutor and two judges serving Putnam County.

One primary responsibility of the sheriff is operating the county jail, which costs approximately $2.5 million a year and serves all Putnam County police. (The current jail, successor to the old jail in which the current Sheriff Baugh lived as a child, was opened in the mid-1990s.) Related responsibilities include transporting jailed individuals charged with crimes to court, and providing security during trials and, more generally, for the Putnam County Courthouse. The Sheriff’s Office is also responsible for serving warrants on county residents.

Besides overseeing the jail, the sheriff is in charge of 20-plus “road deputies,” detectives and the like. That part of the sheriff’s responsibilities costs about $3.5 million annually.

Sheriff Baugh prefers the term “Sheriff’s Office” to the often-used “Sheriff’s Department” to make clear that the sheriff is not a subordinate of any other official in Putnam County government. But he also presumably knows well that the County Council is responsible for allocating money to run the Sheriff’s Office.

The Greencastle Police Department is headed by Chief Chris Jones. First appointed by then-Mayor William Dory in late 2022, Chief Jones was re-appointed in January 2024 by Mayor Lynda Dunbar. The city mayor can replace the police chief at any time. In this regard, Greencastle has a more conventional hierarchical arrangement than the county has with respect to the sheriff.

Seventeen sworn officers serve the approximately 10,000 city residents. As my earlier columns have noted, municipalities such as Greencastle provide government services (water, sewerage, etc.) not provided by government in rural areas of the county. In this vein, the county’s largest municipality provides substantially more police coverage in the city than is possible elsewhere in the county.

None of the five towns in Putnam County offer a 24/7 police presence. But the Greencastle Police Department, as well as the two other police forces treated in this column, do. The Greencastle Police Department currently costs about $1.7 million per year to operate, amounting to about 17 percent of the city’s annual budget.

Let me turn now to the DePauw Police Department and its seven “sworn officers.” Headed by Chief Charlene Shrewsbury, the department is operated and funded by a private university, not by a government. Chief Shrewsbury reports to DePauw Student Life administrators.

Private colleges and universities in most states are allowed to have their own police forces. Besides private colleges/universities, there are very few other kinds of private institutions in the country ever authorized to have “sworn officers” of their own. Indeed, it seems that only a few privately owned airports and some railroad companies have them.

Neither Walmart, Kroger, Elon Musk, nor even a sports celebrity such as Caitlin Clark can have their own “sworn officers.” Of course, companies and individuals can and do have private security protecting them. And those private security personnel can carry guns and use force in carrying out their responsibilities. But they are not “sworn officers” and essentially have no more legal authority to arrest someone than I do.

The presumed advantage to DePauw of having its own police force is to provide its students with the kind of police presence that it prefers. The advantage to the City of Greencastle would seem to be the conservation of resources. Think about it. If the Greencastle Police Department had the same sort of responsibility for policing the DePauw campus as it has in the rest of the city, it presumably would either have to have more than 17 officers or it would provide less coverage in other parts of the city than it currently does.

The history of private universities/colleges having police forces began more than 125 years ago in Connecticut. In the late 19th century, Yale University hired a pair of local police officers to police the campus. In 1918, the Connecticut state legislature passed a law authorizing Yale to have its own police force. Today, DePauw has its own police department, as do some other private universities in Indiana such as Anderson University and Marion University. But Wabash, Hanover College, Manchester University, Franklin College and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology do not.

Police are an essential, indeed even defining, element of government. And the two largest police forces in Putnam County, the Sheriff’s Office and the Greencastle Police Department, easily fit within that perspective. In contrast, the third largest police force in the county is operated and funded by a private university, even as its sworn officers have the same legal authority and jurisdiction as other police officers in the county.