By Holly Zachariah
The Columbus Dispatch
MARION, Ohio — Marion County Sheriff Tim Bailey has four helicopters in a hangar at the local airport.
He readily admits that he doesn’t need four helicopters. But his sheriff’s office has successfully run an aviation unit since 1974, and he knows how it is done.
So when the Washington County sheriff was going to return the two helicopters he had been using free through a federal-government surplus program because he no longer had pilots, Bailey wasn’t about to let the choppers leave Ohio.
He took them through the program instead.
“Before I give them back to the government to let Timbuktu County in Montana or someplace else use them, I’d like to see if we can work out a way to keep them as an asset for Ohio law enforcement,” Bailey said.
“The list of ways that understaffed, rural sheriff’s departments can benefit from covering huge amounts of territory from the air is very, very long.”
Next month, Bailey plans to pitch the idea of a regional aviation unit to the first of several groups of sheriffs from Ohio’s other 87 counties.
Aircraft take a lot of money to operate, and cash-strapped counties can’t be expected to afford them on their own, Bailey said.
But if sheriffs pool their resources, Bailey would either oversee the placement of helicopters in strategic locations across the state or, perhaps, keep them in Marion but guarantee that an aircraft and a pilot would be available to others around the clock.
The idea should be particularly enticing to officials in the northern half of the state because no sheriff’s office north of I-70 flies anymore, said Bob Cornwell, executive director of the Buckeye State Sheriffs’ Association.
In southwestern Ohio, both Butler and Hamilton counties have aircraft.
Sheriffs already collaborate in a similar fashion with eight mobile command-center trucks that were bought a few years ago with federal Homeland Security money.
The trucks are stationed in Ashland, Athens, Geauga, Guernsey, Hancock, Mercer, Montgomery and Ross counties and are able to be deployed across the state as needed in an emergency.
The concept would be the same with the helicopters, Cornwell said.
Bailey concedes that at an operating cost of hundreds of dollars an hour when long-term maintenance, training and fuel are factored in, his helicopters don’t come cheap.
But he has been able to keep the two helicopters his department has had all these years largely because a $45,000-a-year contract with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification & Investigation covers his cost.
The state uses Bailey’s helicopters in its annual marijuana-eradication program. Bailey and deputies John Butterworth and Ryan Zempter are pilots.
The county, however, uses the helicopters for much more than finding marijuana plants, Bailey said.
Searches are probably the most-frequent use, he said, whether for a missing person or a suspect on the run.
Bailey’s office also flies to survey crime scenes, set up and monitor perimeters, and assist in criminal investigations.
The sheriff also takes up county employees for aerial photographs and annual surveys of roads and bridges, services for which many counties must hire out. He even flies blood to hospitals in emergencies.
“When what you need to do is cover a large amount of territory in a short amount of time -- and pretty much everything we do in this business must be done in a short amount of time -- being in the air is invaluable,” Butterworth said.
The State Highway Patrol runs Ohio law-enforcement’s largest aviation fleet, and its 14 airplanes and two helicopters frequently assist other agencies, said Lt. Tony Bradshaw, a patrol spokesman.
Bailey agrees that the patrol’s planes are assets, but he said that because all but two of the aircraft are based in Columbus, timing can be an issue.
Plus, he said, he keeps his helicopters as long as the county can afford it for the same reason he has a dive team, SWAT team and other specialized units.
“I got elected to do a job,” said Bailey, who has been the sheriff since 2004. “I didn’t get elected to call somebody else to do a job for me.”
A report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that in 2007, the most-recent year for which such information was available, one in five large law-enforcement agencies (departments with 100 or more sworn officers) had a specialized aviation unit.
The Columbus Division of Police spends $562,000 a year to run its six helicopters, said Lt. Greg Estep, commander of the division that oversees the helicopter unit. Weather permitting, the division is in the air 16 hours a day, he said.
Columbus pilots assist the suburbs and Franklin and adjoining counties whenever possible, and other areas if supervisors give permission, Estep said.
Martin L. Jackson, a retired pilot and state trooper with the Texas Department of Public Safety, is president of the board of the Airborne Law Enforcement Association. He said aviation units are one of the most-expensive specialized forces a department can run, but that they are worth it.
“Think how many people and how many man-hours it would take to cover the ground that an aircraft can cover in a fraction of the time,” Jackson said. “In a life-and-death business, that matters.”
Copyright 2011 The Columbus Dispatch