Dunn Co. Sheriff Dennis Smith reflects on 40 years in law enforcement

By LeAnn R. Ralph

MENOMONIE  — Let’s just say it is an occupational hazard.

When Dunn County Sheriff Dennis Smith goes out to a restaurant, he says it takes him 15 minutes to reach a table because so many people want to say “hello” and to talk about this, that or the next thing.

“My wife has put up with my schedule for 35 years, so it’s time for her schedule. We’ll still go out. We’ll still see people. They’ll still stop to talk,” he said.

Smith, who has served as sheriff in Dunn County for 18 years, has decided not to run for re-election in November and filed notification of non-candidacy with the county clerk April 10.

 He was elected as sheriff in November of 2000 and took the oath of office in January of 2001.

Adam Zukowski, a deputy with the Dunn County Sheriff’s Department, filed as a registered candidate November 21, 2017.

Kevin Bygd, Captain of Field Services with the sheriff’s department, filed as a registered candidate April 11.

Sheriff Smith has six grandchildren and says being retired will give him more time to go to their basketball games and dance recitals and more time to spend with his wife doing activities they enjoy, such as camping.

“I get phone calls at home, and (my wife) says she can’t believe people will call me at home. It’s a big deal to them. Maybe it’s not a big deal to us, but for them, it’s a huge deal,” Sheriff Smith said.

“As long as I’m working for the county, and as long as I’m working for the public, I don’t think I should be unavailable, especially as sheriff,” he said.

“Do they need to call me at home? Maybe. Maybe not. But a lot of the time, they don’t want to give their name and date of birth to the dispatcher, so they call me at home, probably for some advice. I tell them I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t give legal advice, and I’m not a financial advisor, so I can’t give financial advice, but if it was me, this is what I would do. And it has worked out very well,” Sheriff Smith said.

Reserve officer

According to the sheriff department’s website, Smith is a 1973 graduate of Menomonie High School.

He worked at a local grocery store while attending classes at UW-Stout, and in November of 1975, he became a reserve deputy sheriff and attended recruit school at District One Technical College.

In December of 1979, he became a full-time jailer and dispatcher and continued to fill in on patrol as a deputy sheriff, and in December of 1980, he became a full-time deputy sheriff.

Sheriff Smith noted he also went to EMT school while he attended recruit school.

“Whenever there was an ambulance call, I was there,” he said.

One development Sheriff Smith is pleased about is the defibrillators.

The sheriff’s department bought a couple of defibrillators, and then the Sunshine Rotary conducted a fund raiser and bought them for all of the sheriff’s department vehicles, the municipal squad vehicles in the county and for the first responders.

And speaking of first responders, Sheriff Smith said they are enormously helpful to both the general public and to the sheriff’s department.

Whenever there is a car crash, for example, people have a tendency to pick up car parts lying in the road and throw them into the ditch to get them out of the way, he said.

Anything lying in the road after a car crash should be left where it is for the accident scene reconstruction. Now that the county has a team of first responders, they take care of the injuries and check for scene safety, and if they do not need help, the deputies can then work on preserving and documenting the scene of an accident and to start taking pictures, Sheriff Smith said.

“It sure has helped to make it less complicated. Scenes were always very complicated years ago,” he said.

Top cases

Three homicide cases will stay with  Sheriff Smith long after he leaves the sheriff’s department.

One case was the murder of John Patrick Styer in 2001. Eventually a man named David Krause was convicted of shooting Styer and then burning down the man’s house with his body inside.

Sheriff Smith said Krause had applied to be a reserve deputy with the Dunn County Sheriff’s Department, but there was something about him that made Smith think he might not be a good fit for Dunn County.

Another case was the murder of Mary Schlaise in 1975, a student who was on her way from the Twin Cities to an art show in Chicago. She was found in Dunn County in a ditch near Elk Creek Lake about four miles west of Eau Claire and had been stabbed at least 15 times.

The perpetrator was never found.

Craig Koser of the Dunn County Sheriff’s Department started working on Schlaise murder as a cold case — and still works on it yet today, Sheriff Smith noted.

Another case that remains unsolved is the car pulled out of the channel by the Lamb’s Creek boat landing near Jake’s Supper Club in the late 1970s with the body of a Waukesha woman in the trunk.

People who went swimming near the boat landing could feel the antenna from time to time, but no one believed there was a car in the water, Sheriff Smith said.

The lake level was brought down to fix the dam at Cedar Falls, and then the antenna of the car became exposed, he said.

Although not a single case, the four officer-involved shootings in one year in 2014 also will stay with Sheriff Smith as being among the three or four things he said he was “always afraid of.”

Preparedness

One of the biggest accomplishments during Sheriff Smith’s time in office is the Dunn County safe schools committee to help school districts prepare for an active shooter.

The committee includes school district representatives and members of law enforcement and meets several times per year.

Years ago, as a deputy, Sheriff Smith bought his own rifle and a tactical vest. Now every Dunn County squad vehicle has a rifle, helmets and tactical plates for deputies to wear.

The Dunn County Sheriff’s Department also holds joint training sessions with police departments in the county and the state patrol so all of the officers receive the same training.

The sheriff’s department has held training sessions in the high schools and at Tiffany Creek Elementary in Boyceville.

During the Virginia Tech mass shooting, many of the doors had been chained shut, so now the deputies also carry bolt cutters in the car and mauls along with a tool with a wedge on one end and a hook that can pry open a door.

A school shooting is one of those incidents you hope never happens, but if it does, you want to be prepared, Sheriff Smith said.

Dunn County is working on a child abduction response team, too, and will soon be participating in a simulation event.

Sheriff Smith recalled several years ago, two children went missing in Downsville. As it turns out, they had gone to a neighbor’s place because the neighbor had kittens, but they had not told anyone they were going, and it was a tense time until they were found safe.

“We have done a lot to be prepared … and we’ve got more we are working on. There are 20 things you could prepare for, but what are the three you should prepare for,” Sheriff Smith said.

“Do you prepare for the biggest and the nastiest thing or the most likely?” he asked.

The most likely incident the sheriff’s department would have to handle would be a tornado or a chemical spill, Sheriff Smith said.

“When you hear about all these towns where things happen — they said, oh, it will never happen here. The ‘it will never happen here’ thing drives me a little crazy,” he said.

Scams also bother Sheriff Smith, in spite of all the efforts to educate the public.

One of the most insidious is the scam where someone calls and says he or she is a grandchild — “Grandpa or grandma, I’m in trouble” — and ask for money to be sent to a city in another state or to a foreign country.

Sheriff Smith said he believes scams happen in Dunn County every week but people are often too embarrassed to report the incidents.

Drunk drivers

The last year before Smith became sheriff, Pepin County had 54 drunk driving convictions and Dunn County had 58.

At the time, Pepin County had 8,400 people and Dunn County had almost 40,000 people, the university, and the interstate highway system, Sheriff Smith said.

Within a couple of years after Smith became sheriff, deputies were arresting 200 drunks per year.

The fatalities went from 10 or 14 per year to about five per year, Sheriff Smith said.

In 2012, there were ten or 12 fatalities, he noted, but some of the accidents involved two or three victims.

The increase in the enforcement of the traffic laws and the OWI laws have made the highways “quite a bit safer in Dunn County,” Sheriff Smith said, noting he told the deputies, “This is our challenge, and we can do better.”

Dunn County covers 862 square miles and is number 11 out of the 72 counties in the state in terms of size, he said.

New sheriff

Sheriff Smith has some advice for the new sheriff who will be elected in November.

“Sometime between the date of the election and until the day you start, make a list of things you want to accomplish, and prioritize (the list), because once you get in, you will be busier than you ever thought. It’s bigger than you ever imagined,” he said.

“You go from just worrying about yourself, or if you are a sergeant, you worry about a few people on a shift, or if you are higher up you have a few more people, but the sheriff is in charge of the jail, he is in charge of the civil process, he is in charge of court security, in charge of patrol and investigations. You have supervisors to help you cover those things, but still, the questions you are bombarded with are overwhelming,” Sheriff Smith said.

“I’ve been lucky in that I have selected good sergeants and good people to help and then have supported them on the decisions they make. At first, nobody wanted to make a decision … then we went to monthly supervisor meetings,” he said.

During the meetings, they talk about employees and schedules and if there is equipment to update or what kind of training is available.

“You try to hire people who are smarter than you are, but if you don’t let them them put in their two cents, they don’t have any push to make things (better),” he said.

The sheriff’s department conducts detailed background checks on employees and has a field officer training program, Sheriff Smith noted, and says his philosophy is if the department hires someone but does not give that person the training he or she needs to do the job, if the person fails, “that’s our fault.”

But if the department hires someone and gives the person all the relevant training available and the person still fails at the job, then it is on the employee and not on the sheriff’s department.

Treatment court

The Criminal Justice Collaborating Council also is a positive development for Dunn County, Sheriff Smith said.

Someone who is always in trouble could have had poor home life as a child or could have had an uncle sexually abusing them, Sheriff Smith said, explaining that he tells his deputies they do not know where people came from.

“It’s not a deputy’s job to judge them,” he said.

On the other hand, in recent years, people have become more threatening to law enforcement, as well as more combative, and will try to take the officers’ guns away and say they are going to shoot the deputies, Sheriff Smith said.

Years ago, people would ask if they could buy a beer or a soda pop for a deputy before being hauled off to jail, he recalled.  

The sheriff’s department does not put people in jail because “we are mad at them,” Sheriff’ Smith said, adding he wants people to be better off when they leave the jail than when they came, which is why the jail has many programs available.

If the drug treatment court helps people remain sober for two years, that is two years the sheriff’s department does not have to deal with them, and it is two years the district attorney’s office does not have to deal with them or the courts, Sheriff Smith said.

Many people graduate from treatment court, but then they relapse in a year or two. Several who have relapsed have come in to tell the sheriff’s department they have relapsed and want to know if they can “hang around for the treatment court,” Sheriff Smith said.

Methamphetamine is a huge issue for Dunn County as well.

The drug is so addictive the number of addicts can increase quickly.

Most of those who are arrested are users and low-end distributors, and law enforcement must figure out a way to get a handle on the big distributors, Sheriff Smith said.

The new sheriff will have to be creative in how to find the major distributors to slow down the methamphetamine supply, he said.