Two Garland County Sheriff's Department officials graduated from an exclusive school for law enforcement officers last week.
Undersheriff Jason Lawrence and Lt. Joel Ware graduated from the XLVIII session of the School of Law Enforcement Supervision on Friday. The school, which is put on by the Criminal Justice Institute in Little Rock, consisted of 45 students from law enforcement agencies throughout the state, a news release said.
"It was my honor to nominate these leaders for this class," Sheriff Mike McCormick said in the release. "I knew that they would represent our department, and the people of Garland County with distinction and honor."
The news release described SLES as a "very exclusive school," with each of its students having to be nominated by their law enforcement organization. After their nomination, the student then has to be accepted for attendance by CJI.
"To be nominated is a huge honor," Lawrence said. "To be accepted is even bigger."
Lawrence and Ware attended four weeks of teaching, one week each month from February to May. Those teaching in the school were former members of law enforcement, field experts and attorneys. These instructors sought to "bring an understanding of law enforcement management and offer applicable knowledge of how to meet the challenges leaders will face throughout their career," according to the release.
Lawrence said he and Ware learned about a wide variety of topics within the umbrella of law enforcement leadership through the instructors.
"You deal with everything from employment law, how to deal with difficult employees, civil liability, constitutional law, officer mindset," he said.
The SLES graduation gave its students an opportunity to nominate a class speaker to give a ceremonial address. The students nominated Ware.
Lawrence called SLES "one of the best leadership courses" he and Ware had ever been through.
"Both of us found ourselves energized in regard to leadership skills -- things that we're doing right and things that we aren't doing yet that both of us need to focus on," he said.
"Both are to be commended for the effort it took to complete this course," McCormick said. "I am grateful to have leaders such as Undersheriff Lawrence and Lt. Ware within my department."
Lawrence and Ware are are the sixth and seventh GCSD official to have graduated from the school since 2015, McCormick said, and he is pushing to send as many personnel above the rank of corporal as he can through the school.
"When the sheriff took office in 2015, he was adamant to give the people of Garland County the most professional law enforcement agency in the state," Lawrence said.
The department hopes to send two or three more of its officials to SLES for its fall school, he said, noting such an effort is part of improving the department, which he called "the premiere law enforcement agency in the state of Arkansas."
"We will be the best of the best by implementing the ideas that we've gotten from the class and continuing to do so through our future leaders that we go through," Lawrence said.
Local on 05/25/2017