Rural reckoning: Nebraska county law enforcement leaders grapple with staffing woes

PAWNEE COUNTY, Neb. (KOLN) - Pawnee County Sheriff Braden Lang pulled himself into his marked truck and turned his key in the ignition. A radio advertisement mirrored his mood: "It's easy to get burn out with your day-to-day routine," it blared before Lang turned it off.

It's those ads and the long, lonely stretches of road through Pawnee County's autumnal valleys that remind him just how hard his work has become.

"It's borderline impossible," Lang said.

Lang—with the backing of a paper-thin budget—leads an over-worked crew of three deputies to cover the county's law enforcement needs every minute of every day.

"We work through it," Lang said. "I was sick with COVID twice, and I was still out doing my job because we were essential workers at that point. We didn't have anybody else to do it."

Lang said it's been a plight in Nebraska's hinterlands for awhile, but recently, a number of factors converged to create what he said is a "perfect storm."

The problem, Lang said, starts with bringing in recruits.

"No matter what the pay is, you're 50 miles from the Walmart," he said. "You're dating possibilities are pretty slim, and there really isn't all that much to do as far as recreation. So unless you really, really like hunting fish, you're kind of limited on options."

Nebraska's LB 51, signed into law in 2021, raised the bar to become and remain a deputy—a move many law enforcement leaders hailed. But Lang said it came with drawbacks.

"We went to two plus years on the previous go around without even getting a single viable applicant," he said.

Lang recently scored another hire, giving him the minimum staff to work with, but then, the challenge becomes keeping them.

"We are currently in an arms race as law enforcement across the nation and in the State of Nebraska," Lang said. "All it takes is for your neighboring county to raise pay rates or increase benefits for their staff. Then, they're basically sniping all your employees."

Across a population of more than 2,500, violent crimes crop up occasionally.

"This is exactly the same as anywhere else," Lang said. "It's just on a smaller scale. We had a half naked drunk guy break into the courthouse and harass court staff and got into a fight with the state trooper and myself."

The topography of the county—so many wooded, rolling hills and desolate fields—makes isolation more palpable.

"You get down to the bottom down here in Burchard, your radio and cellphone do not work," Lang said. "When I say sometimes you're on your own as a single officer, you're on your own. You can't call for help."

Since 10/11 did a ride along with Lang, one of his deputies was injured in a brawl with a suspect, further underscoring and compounding the problems.

"In Lincoln and Omaha, if one of their officers gets into it like this with somebody, their response time for backup is maybe 3 to 5 minutes," Lang said. "Ours is an hour or more."

It's a problem rattling county governments far beyond the borders of Pawnee.

"We're probably near a tipping point where we need to have those very frank conversations as to what our communities, what we want our communities to look like in the future," Jon Cannon, the executive director of the Nebraska Association of County Officials, said. "As you see the the rapidly depopulating portions of our state, the same goes with law enforcement. A lot of it is bound up in the whole property tax issue. You've got fewer and fewer people that are there to carry the load."

NACO is dedicated to educating county leaders and advocating for them. Cannon raised a staggering statistic about an eight-county swath of land in central Nebraska, known as Region 26.

"This is an area that's literally the size of Connecticut," Cannon said. "And it has 8 squad cars and three dispatch."

It's a similar story for Sheridan County Sheriff Jeff Brewer. He and his five deputies have to cover almost 2,500 square miles in northwestern Nebraska.

"You're just kind of trying to figure out what little fire to put out first," Brewer said. "And hopefully you get it put out before it gets bigger."

Triaging, patching leaks—a far cry from proactive policing. Since the county law enforcement services are necessary, the cost of these rural realities may come to the doorstep of the cities soon enough, Cannon said.

"If we don't invest in it now, we're going to end up having to pay for it later," he said.

For now, Lang is taking it day-by-day—narrowly avoiding burnout by focusing on the positives of his role.

"There are several people that are alive today because I was the one that got that call," he said.

But who and how many people will answer those calls in the future? Lang said that's anyone's guess.