Macon County Sheriff’s Office Adds Mounted Unit
You may see Macon County Sheriff’s deputies on horseback as a new mounted unit makes its debut.
In 2021 Sheriff Andre Brunson was expressing concerns with having a short staff in his office. Now, he not only has more deputies working for him, but he is adding a new unit, one that he’s been trying to bring to Macon County since becoming sheriff in 2015.
“Its definitely beneficial but we do a lot of search and rescue a lot of missing persons out in the forest and around here we just do a whole lot of that, we do a lot of crowd control we do even when you think about the rodeo that we do twice a year you know you could definitely use horses but the benefit of having these hordes in crowd control and the benefit of having them in the search and rescue and the benefit of having them in some of these rural areas you know going places that a car just cant go.”
The announcement came Tuesday that a new mounting unit will be added. Although this new unit comes with benefits of going places cars cannot, the sheriff’s office will now have more responsibilities that come with the care and training of the horses.
“For the purposes of search and rescue and the different applications that Sheriff Brunson has for these horses is really specialized training so you cant just take a horse from a pasture it has to be horse that’s trained to deal with noises and crowds and not spook easily so its a very intense process.”
Sheriff Brunson says that he is looking forward to expanding the the sheriff’s office. He would like to see it fully staffed with 10 deputies within the next 5 years.
“we want to start out with maybe 6 deputies and go up to maybe 10 deputies full time so were right now actually looking for grants, were taking donations to kind of fund it and were going to try to do it every 5 years to do so but my plan is to at least have 10 full time deputies on the mounted deputy squad.”
If you would like to support the new unit in Macon County , Click here to donate to their GoFundMe.
