Sheriff Brad Pope’s Message of the Week ~ October 20th, 2023

“The Lyon County Sheriff’s Office is committed to aggressively and professionally enforcing the law and protecting our communities against those who choose a life of crime over our quality of life.”

One part to aggressively target criminal activity in Lyon County is through saturation patrols of our communities. The Lyon County Sheriff’s Office has completed five, large scale saturation operations this year. Our latest saturation patrol was conducted in the Mason Valley Patrol area.

During the Mason Valley saturation patrol, the Sex Offender Task Force, comprised of Lyon County Detectives made home visits to registered sex offenders in Mason Valley (Statistics below).

We began tracking different data with the Mason Valley saturation patrol, and will use that format for future operations. The year to date statistics do not reflect the same categories as the Mason Valley operation. Common categories are listed in the year to date statistics below.

What we have found, is that calls for service in the areas the saturation patrol is being conducted, drop drastically. While the effect is short term, it does suppress criminal activity for the length of event. Long term data is hard to quantify.

When sharing the plan to conduct saturation patrols with the public, the concern was raised that these are “income generators” for the County or State through the issuance of citations. Only 13% of those stopped were issued a citation. 9% of the stops resulted in the arrest of an offender in the vehicle.

The Lyon County Sheriff’s Office will continue to increase our presence in the communities we serve. Every entity of the Sheriff’s Office is working diligently to provide professional law enforcement service on a daily basis.