There are a lot of roads in Franklin County, but these days there aren’t as many sheriff’s deputies to patrol them.

The 14-person patrol unit is short three deputies.

“I’ve got three officers – one’s in the Marine Reserve, one’s in the Army Reserve, and one’s in the National Guard,” Sheriff Craig Davis said.

“I’ve been short of officers, at least one ever since the first call-up to go to Iraq,” he said. “My Marine reservist, he got back from Iraq in August and just got deployed to the Gulf Coast.”

Davis has managed to call on reserve deputies to fill the shortfall, for the time being. But he’s not alone.

Nobody knows exactly how many of the 2,200 Kansans now deployed by the National Guard are police officers, sheriff’s deputies and firefighters back home, but agencies around the state say they’ve lost one or more officers to military duty.

“There are quite a few law enforcement officers who are deployed,” said Darrell Wilson, executive director of the Kansas Sheriff’s Assn. “It kind of puts a hardship on the sheriff’s offices, especially the smaller ones.”

Other examples:

¢ In Iola – home of the National Guard’s 891st Engineering Battalion – three of the police department’s 17 officers were deployed to Iraq earlier this year.

¢ In Tonganoxie, one of the department’s 18 officers has been deployed. His boss, Chief Ken Carpenter, returned from Iraq earlier this year. But Carpenter was unavailable late last week to talk about how his department had been affected; he was out of the office with his military unit for training.

Pete Fogarty, the Kansas national trustee for the Fraternal Order of Police, said: “Every department (in Kansas) is affected, but I can’t tell you if it’s the same for every plumbers union and craftsman union.”

He acknowledged, however, that police and military careers tend to dovetail.

“I know there are a lot of (police) officers in the Guard and Reserves,” said Fogarty, who also is a senior master patrolman for the Kansas City, Kan., police department. “We get a lot of people from the military … and plus we don’t get paid all that much, so it’s a way to supplement the income.”

Ed Pavey, director of the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center in Hutchinson, agreed.

“I think there’s quite a few law enforcement officers that have military backgrounds, still in the Reserve units or in the National Guard,” he said.

The center, which is run by Kansas University, tracks the status of 7,100 officers at all 431 law enforcement agencies across the state. Pavey said that when the Iraq war started, the center received a bulk of notifications that officers were being deployed abroad.

There was a lull about a year later, he said, when a number of officers returned. But a new wave of deployments among police officers has begun, he said – with some officers and deputies going abroad for a second tour of duty.

‘Back to work’

That puts a strain on the departments back home. Temporary replacements must be hired, or the remaining officers must pick up a heavier workload.

“It becomes cumbersome,” said Kathy Bard, Tonganoxie’s assistant city manager. “At the same time, they’re fighting for their country.”

But, she added: “I kind of wish the war would get over so we could get back to work.”

Davis said he is lucky. The Franklin County Commission has agreed to let him pay part-time reserve deputies to handle the load left behind by his deployed officers.

“We’ll make do,” he said.

Davis said that while it can be a strain to work around his officers’ military obligation, he supports their work.

“They are dearly missed,” Davis said. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m very proud of what they’re doing.”