At the recent Florida Sheriffs Association Summer Conference, FSA Deputy Executive Director of Operations Matt Dunagan sat down with new FSA president, Charlotte County Sheriff Bill Prummell. The two discussed his unique path into the field of law enforcement as well as his work as the chairman of the Statewide Commission on Mental Health and Substance Abuse.

Here are a few highlights from their conversation.

Matt Dunagan: I’d like to begin with how you got started in a career in law enforcement before you decided to run for sheriff of Charlotte County and why you wanted to work in public safety?

Sheriff Bill Prummell: Well, it’s kind of an odd story. I’m originally from New York, born and raised there. And I’m a cabinet maker and custom carpenter by trade, and I was basically working in a shop. My wife and I married very young and had a child very young and I was working in a shop, and I was the last one left besides the foreman. At that time, I came home from work and I told Tara that we needed to do something before I had to do something. For years I had a lot of family members and friends telling me that I really needed to look at law enforcement because of my demeanor. And I really wasn’t interested. I like working with my hands.

But like I said, we married young, we had a baby when we were young. My in-laws had a vacation home down in Charlotte County, and I had vacationed with them for one year, and I loved it down here. I do not like the cold weather. I hated the cold weather. So, my father-in-law basically said go down there, the house is paid for. Go down there and give it a go. So, we drove down in an old beat-up car and we never looked back. I applied for the sheriff’s office and probably a year later, I was brought on as a reserve deputy and within that year they hired me as a full-time deputy.

Matt Dunagan: Wow. And has all your time been with the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office?

Sheriff Prummell: Yes, it has been, and it’s been great.

Matt Dunagan: What then ultimately made you decide to eventually run for sheriff and then ultimately win?

Sheriff Prummell: Well, we got hit by Hurricane Charlie at the time I was a sergeant and I worked in the command post, so I worked closely with the sheriff and command staff. And then I saw other commanders from different areas coming in and I saw how they behaved. And I thought, “I can run circles around them,” so I made a decision that that was my goal. And I sat down, and I talked to Sheriff Cameron, and he looked at me and he said, “Great. I’m going to help you,” and from that point on, he challenged me. He assigned me to different commands. He assigned me to jail for a while, which I had never commanded so he gave me that experience.

And then it’s kind of another funny story about how I got in the sheriff’s race. Sheriff Cameron was running for his second term, and I was following him around with my wife, learning how the campaign process worked. Well, it was just after Easter, and after he spent time with his family, he came back and we met him at a campaign event. And it was actually his wife Kanda who spoke to Tara and I and asked what we were doing after the event because she needed to talk to us. And you know Tara’s panicking because she thinks we said or did something we shouldn’t have. We really didn’t know. So after that event, we went to a restaurant nearby for dessert and he sits across the table from me and says, “Bill, I’m going to retire – are you ready?” When I said, “There is only four months until the election,”  he just looks at me and says, “Yeah, but look on the bright side, there’s only four months till the election.” Until I went through some of these other campaign processes and had to go through to the general election and all that stuff, I didn’t know what he meant. It was nice getting it over early, but we had to kick it into gear fast and I actually set a record in the county for getting my petition card signed because I had three weeks to get them done and we got them done in five days. I was looking at the people that were running against him at that time. He had three opponents running against him, which turned into my opponents. And I said I wasn’t giving up the sheriff’s office to any of them because we’ve worked too hard and come too far to give up what we had. We’d had some ups and downs in the Sheriff’s office throughout the year, but under Sheriff Davenport and then under Sheriff Cameron, they really brought us a long way. They built a really strong foundation for me to continue to build upon.

Matt Dunagan: Let our listeners know a little bit more about Charlotte County. If they’re not familiar with it, you know it’s like some of the other parts of Florida, it’s a beautiful piece of land right there on the coast and the Gulf of Mexico. You’ve now called it home for so much of your life. What makes Charlotte County a great place to work and live?

Sheriff Prummell: Charlotte County is a beautiful place. And they used to say that Charlotte County is one of Southwest Florida’s best kept secrets that somebody told because now everybody’s moving there. But, you know, we’re nestled between Lee County, Fort Myers and Sarasota. Everybody knows those and they aren’t really familiar with Charlotte County. But we’re the second largest estuary in the state. We’ve got the Myakka River and the Peace River that empties into Charlotte Harbor. We’ve got the intercoastal waterways and of course, as you mentioned, we’ve got the Gulf of Mexico. We have the barrier islands, which are Palm Island, Don Pedro Island, Knights Island and of course, we got part of Boca Grand.

Matt Dunagan: During your time as sheriff you started so many new initiatives as you mentioned; you operate the jail. What are some of those things that you’ve been able to implement with your team that you’re the most proud of, that you see your Sheriff’s office as it’s growing and bringing new people, some new initiatives that you’re starting that are paying dividends for the citizens of Charlotte County?

Sheriff Prummell: Well, there’s a lot of different things we’re doing.  We’re trying to make sure that the bad people who need to go to jail, go to jail. And I’m trying to teach my people that even good people sometimes make mistakes. And then of course, everybody’s dealing with mental health and substance use disorder stuff. So, I took a deep dive into that. And it all started with my drug addiction recovery initiative, where basically we had put the program out there. We partnered with our local CBC and we put the message out there that if somebody is suffering from addiction and they want help that they can walk up to any one of my deputies on the street, they can call us to their location, they can walk into any one of my offices, they can hand over their user amounts of drugs and say, “I need help.” We’ll take those drugs, and we’ll send them in for destruction. Then we’ll take them to a facility where they can receive that help. So, it kind of started there.

And then after what happened at Marjory Stoneman, I was sitting back in my office one day and just reading the report and thinking about it, and I said that this could happen anywhere, anytime. You know, traditionally when we deal with somebody with a mental health issue, we will go there, and if they meet the criteria for the Baker Act, we’ll Baker Act them, bring them to the facility. If they don’t meet the criteria for a Baker Act, we’ll just kind of settle things down and then it’s on to the next call. Well, I started a mental health unit at that point and basically it only started with one mental health clinician. Again, I went to my local CBC and said, “This is what I want to do.” I want to have somebody in my office so when we’re dealing with these people out in the street, we can immediately refer them to somebody with mental health, especially if they don’t meet the criteria for Baker Act. We have somebody who can do a follow-up and get them into services and work with the family. And then a couple of years later, we expanded that to where we have a mobile response team. So, we have teams of specially trained deputies, we have mental health clinicians and we have a paramedic. And they go out and they handle mental health calls and substance use calls. Because we have a large elderly population, they’ll go out and handle a lot of those well-being checks and stuff of that nature. So, it helps us because  they’ve diverted a lot of people away from emergency rooms that are very expensive, but what’s most important is they’ve diverted them away from jail. Because traditionally when you’re dealing with somebody who’s out there and they’re acting like a fool, or they committed a just a petty nuisance crime, they get locked up. And then the deputy on the road didn’t think anything of it and thinks, “I’m done with them for the night.” But then on the other end, in the jail, now they’re dealing with it. So, we’ve been able to divert a lot of people away from our jail.

You can listen to the full interview with new FSA President, Sheriff Prummell, on the podcast here. We discuss the growth of his county and his mental health and substance abuse initiatives. Sheriff Prummell shares the programs and practices he is most proud of during his time as sheriff, and he discusses his goals for leading FSA for the next year. 

Since 1893, the Florida Sheriffs Association has been committed to fostering the effectiveness of the Office of Sheriff through leadership, innovative practices, legislative initiatives, education and training. For more information about what’s next for sheriffs in Florida, visit our newsroom or subscribe to FSAcast, the official podcast of the Florida Sheriffs Association.