The Pennsylvania House is revisiting a golden oldie proposal for sheriff's deputies that was shot down seven years ago. We believe it should meet the same fate this year.

House bill 466 would give the sheriff's office full investigative and arrest power, help ease the pressure on state police as the primary law-enforcement constabulary in municipalities without local police departments and remove roadblocks that prevent deputies from responding in a timely way to criminal activity.The sponsor of the bill, State Rep. Jim Marshall, R-Beaver and Butler, said for many years and through many court cases, the authority, powers and duties of the 2,600 or so sheriffs and deputies have been questioned and challenged. This bill is intended to clear up those issues, he said, because they operate in gray areas.Marshall also noted that more than 80 percent of the states already give this power to sheriffs and their deputies.In most cases, they have gotten the same training as state and local police, but they generally serve court-related functions, protecting the courthouse and serving bench warrants. Despite this and the fact that they carry firearms, Marshall said they are restricted from investigating crimes unless they see them firsthand and investigate them from beginning to end.If they get information secondhand, they must, by law and court decision, turn over the investigation to state or local police. Marshall's bill has been assigned to the State Government Committee where most legislative observers believe it will languish and die.Although the bill has a handful of co-sponsors - just one from our area, Rep. Rosemary Brown, R-Monroe - most legislators don't want to buck the powerful Fraternal Order of Police or the State Police union, both of which are vehemently opposed to the bill. The state District Attorneys Association is also on record in opposition to the proposal. Not surprisingly, the state Sheriffs' Association is a major backer of the bill.When a similar bill was introduced in 2010, a troopers' association representative said there were more than enough warrants for deputies to serve to keep them busy and occupied; patrols, the representative continued, are the responsibility of the state police in communities that don't have enough or any local police.A 2007 state Supreme Court ruling said that the Bradford County sheriff's deputies have no authority to file drug charges against a defendant whose meth lab was discovered while they were serving a warrant on the property.Then, in 2010, the state Superior Court ruled in a Forest County case that sheriff's deputies were not allowed to conduct a field sobriety checkpoint to determine whether motorists were under the influence of alcohol or drugs.We believe that giving the sheriff and deputies these additional police powers will muddy the jurisdictional waters in communities and could lead to turf battles, which can be counterproductive to effective law-enforcement objectives.As it stands now, state and local police have jurisdictional municipal duties, and this system has been working well. If police were clamoring for help from the sheriff and deputies, this would be a different story, but they are not.Quite the opposite. In fact, they are saying, quite emphatically, "no, thanks." We say the same.By Bruce Frassinelli |

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