Boone County Sheriff’s Office
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Boone County Sheriff Mike Helmig leads a team of approximately 175 civilian and sworn employees in the northern Kentucky community. Boone County encompasses several incorporated and unincorporated cities, like Florence (the largest city in the county) and Burlington (the county seat where the sheriff’s office is located). (Photo by Jim Robertson)
The Boone County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) is one of the largest in the state, employing more than 160 full-time deputies and another 15 civilian employees. Covering 256-square miles of northern Kentucky, the county is growing, in population and commerce, at a rapid rate.
Sheriff Mike Helmig has led the department since he was first elected in May 1997. However, he has been working for Boone County as a sheriff’s deputy since January 1982, he said. Just a few years shy of four decades later, Helmig is proud of the service his department offers to its customers.
“This is a full-service sheriff’s office,” Helmig added. “We have all the normal duties of collecting taxes, serving papers, transporting prisoners and court security. But we also have about 160 deputies in the patrol division, criminal investigation division, electronic crimes, training division, bike patrol, horse patrol, SWAT and hostage negotiations.”
The list of divisions and specialties goes on, and also includes the office’s largest division – school resource officers.
In 1998, a part-time BCSO deputy wrote a cops in schools grant, Helmig said. After the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, the grant was approved, and by the following year, BCSO had a deputy in every middle and high school.
“After the (2018) shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida is when we went to having officers in all the elementary schools,” explained BCSO Major Mike Hall, who leads the Administrative Division responsible for SROs. “The sheriff saw the vision, and the parents were screaming for it.”
Hall credits a team partnership between the sheriff’s office and the local school district for the smooth operation of assigning officers into 27 schools.
“Everybody puts the kids first, and when that happens, it all works,” he said.
The culture of officers serving as SROs also is changing in Boone County, much as it is elsewhere in the commonwealth. In some communities, the SRO was often a retired officer or someone who wasn’t very active on patrol, so they found a comfy gig in the school. Those days are quickly fleeting as more demands are placed on officers charged with protecting children from those who would wish them harm.
Sheriff Mike Helmig joined the Boone County Sheriff’s Office as a deputy in January 1982. He first took office as sheriff in May 1997. Helmig says he likes to lead the organization from the bottom up. (Photo by Jim Robertson)
Tom Scheben serves as public information officer for the Boone County Sheriff’s Office. Scheben has served BCSO for 19 years - 15 of those as PIO. Scheben also works diligently to communicate with citizens through the agency’s social media platforms. (Photo by Jim Robertson)
Helmig said when Boone County’s program first began, it too employed older, retired cops.
“People are vying for these positions now,” Hall added. “They are submitting applications, and they are selected. We have turned down some that we thought maybe their personality wouldn’t fit very comfortably. It has evolved to where the high school and middle schools all have young officers now. But we caution on that; we don’t take them too young right off the street. They have to be seasoned and have the right temperament for this.”
BCSO Public Information Officer Tom Scheben praised the work the officers are doing, saying they make his job more manageable.
Boone County Sheriff’s Major Mike Hall leads the Administrative Division for the office. He is responsible for the school resource officer program, which is BCSO’s largest division, with deputies assigned to 27 schools. (Photo by Jim Robertson)
“I can tell you as the PIO, when there are issues at a school, I have all the answers in front of me. It’s because of Major Hall’s leadership and what he expects out of them,” Scheben said. “He will call and give me a heads up and say, ‘So, we’re having this issue at this school, it’s BS, but, we know it’s BS because we fully investigated it, and here it is.’ … If I have to do something through the media or get phone calls from the public, it’s handled. And you know, that’s refreshing.”
“The tentacles of the SRO program have solved many, many cases in the community,” Helmig added. “Burglaries, drug cases, thefts and all that, just because of an SRO’s contact with the students. We’ll have a video or still photos of some young people committing crime – we just had it a couple weeks ago – immediately put it out to SROs, and we got the identity and their background.”
Lt. Philip Ridgell, who works with Scheben to communicate with the public through BCSO’s social media platforms, said he has seen a lot of positive feedback from the community through their engagement involving SROs. An experience early in his career reinforced Ridgell’s opinion about the value of SROs.
Once while visiting a school, Ridgell ran into a young man who was well known to law enforcement for “not the right reasons.”
“We dealt with him continually,” Ridgell explained. “Fights, domestics, you name it, he was involved in it.”
Ridgell was in the school, and the SRO assigned to the school was not in his office at that time. The student stopped by the office looking for the SRO.
“He said, ‘Hey, is the SRO available?’” Ridgell recalled. “I said, ‘No, he’s out, but he’ll probably be back by the time your next period comes up.’ He said, ‘OK, I just got some stuff going on, and I just really need to talk to him.’ It dawned on me at that point and has stuck with me for a long time about how vital these SROs are.”
BCSO Lt. Philip Ridgell sits in the Criminal Investigations Division’s children’s room, designed for more comfortable interactions with the sheriff’s office’s youngest clients. Equipped with comfortable furniture and space to draw, the room is an asset for children experiencing trauma. (Photo by Kelly Foreman)
Ridgell is one of two lieutenants responsible for the office’s second-largest division – Criminal Investigations. About 25 detectives are assigned to the team, which is divided into multiple specialty areas.
Personal crimes, property crimes, financial crimes, electronic crimes and arson are all assigned to detectives whose attention is focused on those individual types of cases. The agency employs a crime scene unit charged with processing all the agency’s crime scenes. Detectives are assigned to multiple task forces, including the FBI, DEA, IRS and more.
The opportunity for detectives to become specialized in a particular type of investigations greatly benefits the department and its customers.
“In this day and age and the age of technology, our personal crimes detectives stay very busy,” he said. “That is why it’s so important for us to specialize in that field. Those types of cases take a certain demeanor, whereas they also take a certain type of work ethic, both of which are vitally important. When we look at personal crimes, it is two faceted. They are horrendous crimes always, but our job isn’t to be so much advocates for the victim. We will always stand behind the victim. But it’s also to find the truth, that’s the most important thing. So having specialization empowers our people to do right by not only the victim but also any alleged suspects. There is so much weight that is carried with one of those types of charges; you want to make sure you have it right.”
Sheriff Helmig said the unending drug epidemic also demands much of the department’s resources. Recently, Boone County deputies and detectives have dealt mostly with heroin and crystal meth, but BCSO is seeing a cocaine comeback. THC-laced vape pens also are becoming a problem, particularly in schools.
“Just about everything we deal with has to do with addiction – alcohol, illegal drugs, gambling or pornography – just about everything has some type of blowback to some kind of addiction,” he said.
An innovative way PIO Scheben indicated the office is working toward combatting drugs and related crime is through deputies assigned to a crime suppression unit (CSU). Scheben described the deputies as a “small band of Robin Hood types” who work in the patrol division following whatever crime trend arises daily.
Boone County Sheriff’s Sgt. Nate Becker patrols the community. BCSO is responsible for about 16 communities, including three incorporated cities and several unincorporated and census-designated communities. (Photo by Jim Robertson)
“If we have an area that is experiencing car break-ins, they go out and handle it,” he said. “They are heavy into [combatting] local drugs. The experience a regular patrol officer gets through his stint in the CSU is amazing. How many patrol officers would you say haven’t written a search warrant? But almost everybody in CSU can write a search warrant in their sleep. They understand the probable cause and the language that needs to go in there and everything else for that judge to look at it and grant it, and how timely you have to be in getting back and serving it. The returns – I love that program. They are turning results consistently.”
Whether it’s the CSU, the training division, SROs or tax administration, Helmig said what sets Boone County apart is the team environment. Even as the agency and community continue to grow rapidly, Helmig seeks buy-in from all staff members, which is visible in their framed signatures on the wall of his office.
“I try not to drive this from the top down,” Helmig said. “We try to drive it from the bottom up.”
Helmig accomplishes this through providing training and education and helping all staff members “build their brick road” toward their career path. Additionally, the sheriff offers his deputies freedom in establishing their schedules. For example, Helmig dictates the number of deputies needed per shift, he said. From there, based on seniority, the deputies have the freedom to pick which shift they want to work. Because of that, instead of paying a shift differential, BCSO pays a weekend differential to deputies who don’t get to take weekends off.
The response to this team and family-first environment has been very positive.
“I’m just a head coach of a team,” Helmig said. “I’m in the people development business. When one knows where they want to go, I enjoy helping them get there.”
