The chief deputy sheriff of the Freeborn County Sheriff’s Office has adapted to life in a department focused on elections after years of working on the drug task force.

Chief Deputy Gene Arnold’s duties entail handling the day-to-day operations the sheriff doesn’t always have time to do, such as working with warrants, news logs, giving assignments to investigators and working with patrolmen, Arnold said.

Working with the detention center to increase revenue and decrease costs is another big challenge, Arnold said. He said they’re always looking at outside state and federal contracts, as well as contracts from other counties to house more inmates.

“It’s an ongoing struggle to try and increase revenue. Let’s face it, in these times you need all the revenue you can get,” Arnold said.

Aside the revenue, Arnold spends a lot of time early in the year looking over the budget to see what can be cut and see how they can better utilize their staff, he said. Sheriff Mark Harig works a lot with that. Harig is working to get a new radio system, and Arnold said that takes him away from some of his day-to-day operations.

Arnold was originally hired as a detective by the Albert Lea Police Department in 1981 and worked 16 years for the drug task force, where he and Harig were partners for nine years.

After Harig was elected, he asked Arnold to join his team as a detective and he soon became the chief deputy.

Arnold said he likes that each day looks a little different in his job, but a typical day includes trying to bring people with warrants back to Freeborn County. He has worked with people as far away as Texas and North Carolina, he said.

Arnold fondly looks back on his time working with Harig with drug sweeps in the 1990s and said he misses working on the drug task force because he misses working with that team.

“My task force team was of about five to six members, so we were really pretty close,” Arnold said. “So I do miss that. I miss not being out there when you do make a good arrest. You know it’s a team effort. It’s kind of like a football team. If you win, you celebrate and if you don’t win, it’s frustrating.”

It’s that kind of team work, Arnold said, he hopes the sheriff’s office uses in all its operations. Arnold said the people he worked with and the connections he made working on the drug task force have been beneficial in his work as chief deputy.

“We always worked on narcotics in a very proactive way, we never really sat around,” Arnold said.

“We went after everybody. We got information; we went after it. That’s kind of the way the sheriff’s office is. We have a crime; we deal with it as a group. The deputies, the investigators, everybody tries to attack that problem as a group.

“And that’s one of the things we carried in from our task force.”

To someone like Arnold, who calls himself proactive, the hardest part is working in an office and attending meetings, because Arnold said he likes to be out and about.

Being sheriff is not a job Arnold would want, because he said he wouldn’t want to go to so many meetings and deal with the political side of the job. Arnold said he is happy with his position, but he hasn’t anticipated everything that would come with the job.

“I wasn’t prepared for the political part of it: the elections every four years,” Arnold said. “The animosity, you know, the dealing with whether or not you’re going to have the same boss every four years.”

A chief of police can stay at a position for more than 20 years, but Arnold said he faces the prospect of having a new boss every four years.

If Harig was not sheriff, it’d be up the next sheriff to decide whether Arnold would stay on as chief deputy. If a new sheriff came in, Arnold said he’d likely go back to working as an investigator.

“Whenever you have a department based on elections, that makes it tough,” Arnold said. “Elections cause a lot of conflicts. Those are some of the issues you have to deal with in the sheriff’s office. Whether they think the right guy was elected or not, you have to deal with them. … You still work through it and try to make them understand they’re a very important part of our department.”

“I want us to be the shining example in the area,” Arnold said. “I want other facilities to look at us and say, ‘Wow.’”

Police work is different from other work in that it’s a constant job, with people working all the time, even on holidays, Arnold said.

“It’s always easy to say if I had six more guys we could do it a lot easier. Well, easy isn’t always cost-efficient,” Arnold said.

Arnold said he is proud of the professionalism that the sheriff’s office has shown to the public and said he hopes the public feels free to come to them with any concerns.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have the funding to do community policing,” Arnold said. “Our theory is it’s our job to make you feel safe. And that’s the message I hope the public has about the sheriff’s office, that we’re out there making people safe. If we’ve accomplished that, then I think we’ve accomplished what we need to.”