 Thanks so much for doing this. Thank you for having me. So the first question I have is, why do you want to be sheriff? Well, I've been in the Sheriff's Office for nine years. And I have been told for the majority of that that I need to run because the way I pretty much handled my units and how I handled the inmates and how I took care of the officers and stuff. And it wasn't until the audit of 2018 come out. And I actually remember back when it came out, when we got the email saying we're going to be audited. And we looked at some of the questions. We knew there were issues. We were losing people left and right. And we kind of had an idea of what was going on. So when the audit came out, it was perfect. And so I was telling all my people, you need to be, we need a voice. This is the one time, if this is true, what they're saying, this is an anonymous audit, then we need to be heard. Now is the time. But we pushed and I pushed, never in a million years without a thought that 93% of the staff put in for it. But you'll do the audit, that really was a mindblower. But what blew me away the most was when the results started coming out, then the fingers started getting pointed to. And at the time I was a sergeant for about six months. And the fingers were being pointed towards us, the sergeants, the front line supervisors. We were the cause of everything. And we're all like, wait a minute, we all just got promoted. This stuff's been going on for years. And so how are we at fault? So over time, the issues were still losing people. The issues were still occurring. I'm getting more and more upset with what's going on, not being happy anymore. You know, and this is a profession I've loved. I've been here for 17 years. I truly love being a law enforcement officer. But I didn't want to be at work anymore. And we actually had an issue that stemmed from the audit with another supervisor. And I actually, I was on overtime. I actually requested to go home. I said, I'm done. I don't want to be here. And I sure don't want to work for this particular person. And so I got sent home and I talked to my wife about it. And she's like, you know, you've been playing this idea for months. Stop playing. Let's do it. Those guys love you. They want you to be their leader. So do it. And so I put my notice in the next day. And the day after that, I got put on administrative leave. They found out while I was leaving. And we've been planning ever since. And here we are. We're in our third week now. So my next question is about your qualifications. But I guess you've been kind of talking about it already. Yeah. So you were actually a sergeant when the audit came out? Yes. Yes. I've actually been doing this for 17 years. And not all with the sheriff's office. I've been with the sheriff's office for nine years. I was promoted in seven, which people told me it could be totally unheard of. And I blew them out of the water. I actually started in the private sector. I worked from the federal side of Las Vegas with the federal bureau of prisons. We were a private organization. Was a big thing when I was with the private prisons to where I actually worked for one. We were very similar to the diversion center that's here in Athens. Our job was to get the inmates ready for society. They came to us at the last 10% of their sentence. So our job was to get them released, get them out and being prepared to be productive citizens. And then I moved to Georgia shortly after that and worked at the Department of Juvenile Justice with them for about three years. And put myself in the police academy. And I've been with the sheriff's office for the last nine. Why do you think you'll make a better sheriff than your opponents? Which one? If you're talking about my former boss, Sheriff, I were Edwards, I would think mostly because I care. I care about the agency. I care about the people that worked there. They're our family, you know? One of the things when I did my opening article that I had mentioned was with our work schedules, we spent more time with our work than we do with our families. And in time, you start growing that bond. You become, that's your new family. So I've known everyone within our ranks. I know their families. I've watched some of their kids grow up. I built a really strong rapport with them. With the sheriff, and even when I first started nine years ago, I never thought it was true until I just started looking. But the running joke was he never knew who you were. Even though that's the man who swore you in. That's the man that made the final decision whether or not you got a job with them or not. But if you ever watched him, if you walked up ahead and shake your hand, he'd look at your name tag to see who you were. And with 160 people, that kind of means something. That means you don't know who your people are. You don't know anything about their people. Some of the things that he had said when we're going through the audit and we're trying to get things, I guess, that the storm had hit us. And he had a lot of meetings with us. And some of the things he would say was I don't have to be around to show you that I care. And that's totally false. They want to see the sheriff around. They want to see that the leader of the organization actually does care about them and therefore them when the need is. What makes me better than John Q? I've been there. I've been there nine years. I've lived it. I've moved up the ranks. I've worked in courts. I've worked on the road for three years in warrant division. I've seen what it's like out there on the road. I know what it takes to run the biggest liability of the sheriff's office. So that's the jail. I've done it 14 of my 17 years in. I've worked behind the fence of some capacity. So with all of that, just I know these guys. I know how it works. I know how the interworking of the sheriff's office is. So it just makes perfect sense for me to run it as a new sheriff. John Q's got some great ideas. I'm not taking nothing away from him. He's been in this business about as long as I have if not a little bit longer. But he's PD. All his ideas is if he was running or applying for the chief of police. Great ideas. But we're not the police department. We're the office of the sheriff. We're a constitutional position. We're in charge of the jail, the courts and any paper that comes from the courts. That is what we do, you know? So it just makes perfect sense that I'd be the one to run it. And what will your top priorities be in the first year in office? Getting that morale up. Getting some officers built, get in there. The morale is probably at its all-time low. I've never seen these guys so miserable. And a lot of it is because of the overtime that they're working. They're working their tails off in that jail. And actually not just the jail, the organization is a whole. Because now we've got court people working overtime at the jail. We've got road people working overtime at the jail. I just found out that we now have been pulled on jail people that are certified, that are road certified to go help out in the road and go do transports and stuff. So the morale has got to get brought up first. First and foremost. And I think the change within the Sheriff's Office is going to be that beginning. Some of the things that I want to do with them, I got to get with HR, look over the budgets to see if we can do it in the budget. If not, we'll move some stuff around and make it work. But these guys get paid overtime one day a month. Instead of every two weeks like a normal employee does. So if they get paid every two weeks, they're at a lower tax back. They see more of the money and they see it right away. And I think that will bring them up a little bit more until we get this staffing issue taken care of. Next thing we do is get the recruitment going. Get it back. They were running it when I was before I left. We were bringing people in the door. We were starting to look at overtime numbers starting to come down. And then as always and as usual, they halt or slow the recruitment. And now they're back up to four or five days a month of mandatory overtime. When I left, we had these guys down to three. Recruitment is going to be the top priority and get the morale brought up at the same time. There's actually agencies out there. Yes, it's a nationwide norm. Not nationwide, but it is nationwide issue that law enforcement are having problems with staffing. But there's agencies out there that are at full staff that have waiting lists. And those are the people that I'm looking at. Those are the people that I'm talking to. What are you doing to get to the level you're at right now? And one of them is here in Georgia and they're in Metro Atlanta. And that's Alpharetta PD. They're a full staff and have been for a while. And all it is is just pretty much what we have been talking about all along. Taking care of your people. Empower them with their jobs, let them do their thing. So also in that recent audit that was done of the Sheriff's Office, there were other problems as well. Like some deputies reported being retaliated against for bringing up issues they face day-to-day in the jail. They say there's a culture of fear and intimidation in the Sheriff's Office and also favoritism that's shown to certain employees. I was wondering how you were talking to that. Working there for nine years? Yes, it happens. They don't like a voice. They don't like someone expressing their opinion, especially if it's the truth. I've seen people be promoted because they are consistently part of the Sheriff's Big Fundraisers, the golf tournaments. There's people that are always participants, whether they're actually playing or whether you're contributing to the cause. Those are the people that have been moved up, whether in positions or promotions. The click, the good old boy syndrome, whatever they call it is gonna be over come January 1st, 2021 when I take office because you gotta earn it. If you want it, show me what you got. And we'll go from there, you know. Okay. So the Sheriff's Office was criticized by some community groups in 2018 in cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Yes. And you yourself have already posted that you support the 287G program. I was wondering if you could explain what that program was and why you supported it. Yes, actually, and you're correct that when the Immigration hit pretty hard, I actually, the Sheriff came to me because he found out, as you'll find out here now, I am actually part Hispanic. I'm 29% Hispanic, my mom's side, we're from the Michigan-McConn region in central Mexico, which is just actually south of Guadalajara. And even though I'm not totally fluent, I know just not to get myself in trouble, but I don't know a whole lot of Spanish. But he actually asked me the question, what would you do in this situation? And I told him point blank. I said, I think these guys are being stereotyped. When he chose not to no longer cooperate with ICE, that was a perfect move. No longer accept detainers because a detainer, by law, is something that does not occur in a jail. A detainer is a traffic stop. A detainer is a person walking down the street that has reasonable suspicion of doing something or probable cause of doing something and then officer stops and requests to talk to the person. That is the detainment. When you're in jail, you're on formal charges, followed by either an arrest warrant, a traffic citation, or any paper that says that they are supposed to be in that jail under arrest, okay? When immigrations would send their detainers, yeah, we were holding them as like every other agency across America for 48 hours once they finished with us. When they finished with us, they were no longer on formal charges. They're just being held for 48 hours. They're being detained, which means we were holding them illegally. And you got a smart person come in the door and say, you know, I'm gonna file a lawsuit against you for false imprisonment. They would have won because we were holding them against their will. They were done with all of their formal charges. They're criminal charges, whether it be aggravated assault all the way down to driving with no license. We should have cut them loose. When I was in warrants, my each warrant officer had a letter group. Mine was F, G and H. I used to joke because it was the, most of them were Hispanics. So I had the Valley of the Hispanics, okay? But when I go knock on a door and most of them were fairer to appears, most of them were traffic charged for fair to appear. So I go knock at the door and I finally be able to talk to someone. Nine times out of 10, they're telling me immigration's already coming and got them. I'm like, when? A day or two after they got released from jail. Okay, well, I guess I'd better go tell the bonding company that they've been, they're either in Atlanta or they've already been deported, depending upon how long that warrants been. And then they would tell me that they also took my mom, my dad, my sister, my uncle. So what immigration's would do is they would run everyone in that house. And whoever was undocumented, they took. Because of the one person who broke the law of the land, whether it be something as minor as driving on a traffic violation, well, driving on a no license or on a domestic violence charge, those charges isn't what got the person deported, but that's what got them in our jail and that's what raised the red flag with immigrations. The 287G program I looked at it, it keeps everything in house, it keeps everything in the jail. We deal with only the person that was brought to us. It keeps immigrations out of our backyard. What it does is we send however many people on one. My plan is just to send one person. There's gonna be a test pilot program. Send one person to South Carolina, get them trained for four weeks, bring them back. What the 287G program really is, is a database of people, illegal immigrants, or I'm gonna rephrase immigrants, worldwide that have warrants that we don't know about. But it would involve training a car mechanic sheriff to be an immigration officer basically and to cooperate with clients? Yes, and paid for by immigrations and not the sheriff's office. So why do you support that? What's that? Why do you support that program? Because I want immigrations out of our backyard like everyone else does. As long as we deal with the person that's in the jail only, immigrations is not gonna go to that person's house and run everyone there. So I want to see if it works, okay? Actually, I've also reached out to other sheriffs. There's six other- What would it mean to you to have it work? What would that be like? What's that again? Like if the 287G program works and you wanted to continue it, like what would that look like? Getting more people trained? Trained to be immigration also. Well trained to be DIOs, detention in for, detention, oh my God, I didn't write down the actual. They're called DIOs or Detention Immigration Officer. I think that's what it is. I'm not for certain. I guess what I'm gonna ask is, do you support deporting undocumented youths? That is a tough question because one America was founded on immigrations. My family came from, from Mexico. I want to say I support because when something like this happens, they are taken away from the families. I don't know if I may man myself. I have a wife and kids myself. And I wouldn't know how I would feel knowing I would turn away from my family. Watching the news, you'll see what's going across in the border states. It sucks. Watching those kids being torn from their parents. So it's difficult to say that I support something, but what I support is the people who are here that are, I don't want to, it's not breaking the laws of the land because I think if you're here on a note, on driving a no license charge, come on. That's a $185 citation. Go away. But if you're here on murder, or you raped a child, or an aggravated assault, you step, if you're in a violent crime, then yes, you need to go. You can't be here. That's the support. And this is why I think we should at least try the 287G because there's out there, and we actually got stats. I looked, I looked, I'm doing a lot of homework I'm waiting for this. Fiscal year 2018. There were 700 immigrants deported. 670 were convicted from dangerous drugs. 154 sex offenses and assaults. 150 were obstructed into the police which I don't know if it's fighting the police or if they actually run it from the police. If it's running from the police, okay, that's kind of a stupid stat. Is that for mountains? No, this is the 27G program as a whole. I don't have, I don't have the stats for Georgia. I'm still actually in the research phase with this. The 287G in all honesty, yes, I'm looking at it, but it's not my top priority. It's not gonna be, as soon as I take office, this is what we're gonna do. I got a bigger fish, I got a fry. I got bigger issues. I've got a short staff that's about 30% short staffing. I got an overtime issue that needs to be taken care of. I've got a lot of the people that I've stood by and worked by for nine years that needs a break. The people that work in that jail and work in the sheriff's office, those are gonna be my top priority. You know, if I get to this two, three, four years from now, okay, if I don't get it to my first election and I decided to run it, run on the second term and we look at it in the second term, okay, this isn't gonna be my top priority, okay? And I think that's probably where I didn't quite get the message out when I first saw this program. I don't have any more questions. Is there anything else that you'd like to say? No, that's pretty much it. Yeah, awesome. Oh, thanks for giving me a second. Thank you, thank you.