With a little more than a year to go before his office will again be on the ballot in Lexington County, Sheriff Jay Koon spoke of his department’s recent accomplishments and difficulties at the Lexington Chamber’s Aug. 8 Business Over Breakfast meeting.

Koon arrived at the meeting having recently been named the state’s Sheriff of the Year by the S.C.  Sheriff’s Association. This award comes to Koon after nine years in office.

The county’s top lawman addressed several difficulties, but tempered them with emphasizing strides they’ve made in recent years, telling the crowd that they had their biggest hiring year in 2022, with 90 new officers added to the department’s ranks.

When it came to challenges the department has faced, Koon spoke of the “thousand year flood” of 2015, which devastated many areas of the county, along with two plane crashes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the civil unrest that reached a boiling point in 2020, with the Sheriff noting a wave of shootings in the U.S. and a “national tide” against law enforcement.

“Leadership has been tough during those times,” Koon said. “Because sometimes it's easier to sit on the sidelines and throw rocks instead of solutions.”

He also said that these challenges lead to difficulties in retention, explaining that his department has worked through this problem through pay increases and has had major success with hiring. 

The sheriff said that this is how his department was able to team with other law enforcement agencies to ensure that at least one dedicated resource officer is now assigned to every school at each of the county’s five public school districts.

But there are still staffing difficulties within Koon’s department, with the sheriff saying that progress is being made in bolstering the staff at the Lexington County Detention Center, which his department oversees. He added that working at the jail is a difficult job.

One member of the crowd asked Koon how the community can help the department and its officers.

“Simply just thanking the officers when you see them. It seems small, but I can tell you when people come in from across the country, they're not used to that,” Koon said. “They'll say, ‘Guess what, Sheriff, I went to drive through the window and the car in front of me bought my meal,’ and it blows them away.”

As Koon keeps going toward next year’s election, two retired law enforcement officers have announced plans to run against him, Garry Rozier (a former state Highway Patrol instructor who held a June fundraising concert at Lexington’s Icehouse Amphitheater) and Billy Warren (a former Lexington sheriff’s deputy member of the state Highway Patrol who now owns 10 Zero Driving Academy).