The Chattooga County Sheriff’s Office was recently awarded a grant from North Georgia Electric Membership Corporation’s (NGEMC) “Operation Round Up”.

Sheriff Mark Schrader said, “We applied for and received the grant in the amount of $10,000.00. The purpose of this grant request was to help in outfitting our patrol cars with tablet computers, mounts and related equipment that would allow deputies to stay out in the community and complete their required paperwork.

For instance, in 2014 deputies completed 1835 incident reports for citizens. On average a basic incident report would take 15 minutes to complete. With these numbers approximately 458.75 hours was spent typing incident reports at the Sheriff’s Office. So each time a deputy takes a report from a citizen they must travel out of their patrol zone and return to the sheriff’s office to complete that report. Deputies can also check for local outstanding warrants and other information as well. With this grant we were able to outfit 10 of our 14 patrol units with this much needed equipment.”

The Sheriff’s Department was able to partner with Redmond EMS, who is allowing them to utilize their sub-stations in the county for wireless internet access, which in turn created a location in each of the three sectors in the county where deputies could utilize this new equipment.

Sheriff Schrader said, “What this allows is, if we have a deputy in “C” sector, which consists of the Subligna and Gore areas and that deputy receives a call for service which requires him to complete an incident report, he would travel to the Gore EMS station and complete his report, from his car, and never have to leave that sector. The same goes for the Menlo-Lyerly area which is “B” sector and Summerville-Trion area which is “A” sector.”

The Sheriff expressed his appreciation to North Georgia EMC and Redmond EMS:”I want to thank North Georgia EMC and Redmond EMS for making this possible for the people of Chattooga County.”