Lyon County Sheriff Pope’s Message of the Week on March 14, 2025

Message of the Week 03/14/2025

I receive a lot of questions in reference to our SWAT team from the public and people interested in a career in law enforcement.

The Lyon County Sheriff’s Office SWAT Team is an intricate part of our Department’s function. The successful deployments of our SWAT Team have deescalated, contained, and resolved multiple violent situations peacefully throughout Lyon County since its founding. Members of the SWAT are selected through a rigorous testing process and train twice a month and one week a year.

Today, the SWAT Team consists of 15 part-time operators, three reserve tactical medics, and includes a Team Commander. They respond to incidents in Lyon County, but through mutual aid agreements, are also available to respond to Mineral County, Storey County, and Churchill County.

Sheriff Gene Wilhelm created the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office SWAT Team following the line-of-duty death of Lyon County Deputy George Rice in Smith Valley in 1984. The team was designed to provide advanced equipment, tactics, and training to high-risk situations more rapidly than previously available in the rural communities of Lyon County. Previously, response times for these resources would generally take several hours, putting both our citizen’s and deputies’ lives at a higher risk for prolonged periods of time.

We are often asked how often the SWAT Team is deployed. Over the past 10 years, the team has averaged 4 calls for service per year in Lyon County but assists with numerous other incidents regionally. These incidents are situations that exceed the scope of general patrol or detention duties and include but are not limited to, high-risk search warrants, active assailants, and armed barricaded suspects.

The most recent deployment of the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office SWAT Team was the manhunt in Fernley.
The Lyon County SWAT Team belongs to the National Tactical Officer’s Association (NTOA) and trains to national standards outlined by the NTOA. The Team stays current on national trends and incidents to ensure they provide our citizens with the best chance of a positive outcome during these incidents and accomplish their number one mission: to save lives.

In 2022, the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office partnered with the City of Fernley to obtain a new armored vehicle for the team. This vehicle was selected based on several criteria, including moving away from a military-style vehicle to a vehicle designed specifically for law enforcement operations. This new vehicle expanded the number of personnel it would carry and allowed access to medical equipment in the event of the rescue and recovery of persons experiencing a medical emergency or needing extraction from a hostile area.

Our SWAT Team embodies the Sheriff’s Office motto, “To Protect and Serve.”

Respectfully,
Sheriff Brad Pope