Part II of a Q & A with Sheriff Everett Sesker
Everett Sesker began his law enforcement career in Prince George’s County. He also served as Commander of the Narcotic Enforcement Division and Community Services Division. Sesker, who has worked in law enforcement for 22 years, became Anne Arundel County’s first African American sheriff. Sesker’s term is four years.
Q: Some people may not know much about the Anne Arundel County’s Sheriff’s Office. Can you provide a few examples of key duties that your office handles?
A: Take for example, when you go into the courthouse. You’ve got a court case or you’re there for somebody else. Hopefully you’re just the witness. When you’re in that courtroom, you may see the defendant. They’ll come from the back and the deputies will escort them in front of the desk. That’s what people see. What people don’t see is that there’s a huge operation that goes on in the basement of the courthouse. You have multiple offenders with deputies in holding cells. Every inch of the courthouse is covered by cameras. They have to get the defendants up to the right courtroom on time, take them out of the courtroom and bring them back down. Then, they’ve got to take them back to Jennifer Road to the Department of Corrections, or they have to bring new people in for the one o’clock hearings that will be going on. So, there’s so much going on, Monday through Friday, every day that the courthouse is open.
On the other side of matters, we deal with the warrants. When these warrants come in from the courts, we have a great group of civilian personnel and they’re handling hundreds of warrants each week. They’ll put these warrants into different systems such as NCIC [National Crime and Information Center] so other jurisdictions are aware that this person has an open warrant. We deal with the other jurisdictions also because they will call all the time and say, ‘Hey, do you have this individual? If you do, hold them. We’re coming to get them.’ The process of doing extraditions and things like that is all done by civilian personnel.
We also have deputies that go out on the street. They’re looking for people. In any given week, they can serve close to 100 warrants, but they’ve probably made 150 attempts just looking for people, going from house to house, jobs, everything. We have the civil process of people who serve evictions. It’s unfortunate that we must do evictions, but this is part of the job that we have as sheriff’s deputies. It’s so much that we do that a lot of people are not aware of, so I’m going to try and show our work and promote the things that we do and let people know.
This is a shameless plug. We’re looking for deputies right now. We’ve got civilian positions that are open so we’re hiring. If anybody’s interested in a career in law enforcement, please look at us and hopefully it’ll work out.
Q: What website may people visit to learn more about the positions?
A: They can go straight to our web website, https://www.aacounty.org/departments/sheriff/. They can visit our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/AACOSHERIFF/.
Q: Is there anything that you want to do to improve trust building in the community, particularly outreach in the African American community or communities of color?
A: It’s about getting out into the community. When people can see you, and they can approach you and ask some questions, they feel more comfortable with you. The Caucus of African American Leaders had a ceremony with Carl Snowden. They had a few elected officials there and I was one of them. They redid the swearing-in ceremony for us, and they also did another swearing-in, where it was a commitment to the community to keep the promises that we made to get us elected. I take both of those swearing ins very seriously because I made promises to the community, and four years from now, I want them to say, ‘Yes, he kept his word.’
Q: What’s the best way to contact you if someone is interested in you coming out to speak to the community?
A: They can email me. My email address is [email protected].