Oconee County Council Chairman Comments On County Council Commitment Regarding Manpower And Deputy Salaries At The Sheriff’s Office

(Seneca, SC)—–During Tuesday night’s Oconee County Council meeting, Oconee County Sheriff Mike Crenshaw conducted a presentation for County Council regarding crime stats in Oconee County for the last 16 or so years. 

Currently, statistics show that Oconee County is one of the safest counties not only in the Upstate but also in the state of South Carolina as well. 

However, Sheriff Crenshaw says that more work needs to be done, especially in regards to additional manpower and deputy salaries as well. 

Oconee County Council Chairman Julian Davis commented after the meeting on whether there will be a commitment in future County Council budgets in regards to being competitive with other agencies as it pertains to deputy salaries as well as additional manpower for the Sheriff’s Office in future County Council budgets. 

“Definitely, I can speak for myself when I talk about trying to add positions and we talk about one to two positions a year to get us where we need to be, so we are not trying to add a position here or add a position every so often, every other year, because we see the growing pattern not just from the population.” says Chairman Davis. “We don’t have a booming population growth in Oconee County, we have a booming tourism area and we have people that constantly coming in and out of our areas as well as our surrounding counties grow with us so that adds to crime in our area.” 

“I see us continuing to add officers to combat crime and keep us at this low rate,” continues Davis. 

Davis said that violent crime will continue to go down because the deputies are out there but the drug arrest are up due to the amount of deputies out there as well. Davis hopes those numbers will eventually go down as there are less criminals on the street.