The L. Anthony Sutin Award for Innovative Law Enforcement and Community Partnerships recognizes a team of law enforcement and community members whose innovative civic interactions have transformed public safety in their community. In the case of Macomb County (Michigan) Sheriff Anthony Wickersham and County Executive Mark Hackel, that partnership encompasses decades and two major infrastructure projects.

From left to right: Macomb County Sheriff Anthony Wickersham, COPS Office Deputy Director Robert Chapman, and Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel at the L. Anthony Sutin Award Ceremony on March 12, 2024. Photo courtesy of Dean Vaglia.

Sheriff Wickersham and Executive Hackel met as new patrol deputies for the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office. Hackel started out of high school as an emergency dispatcher, and his early experience as a dispatcher did not give him a favorable impression of law enforcement. Even after being accepted to and starting in the academy, Hackel considered returning to dispatch, fearing a professional misalignment, but he stayed on. He learned that police work, like dispatch, “is about engaging people and communication is important. Our only job is to protect their constitutional rights while enforcing the law.” Wickersham spent his first four years in law enforcement as a corrections officer at the county jail prior to joining the academy. Their respective experiences in dispatch and corrections laid the groundwork for two of their largest efforts to improve criminal justice in Macomb County.

“Our constitutional mandate is to run a county jail,” says Sheriff Wickersham. “Our facility was built in the 1950s and the 1960s, and we had a lot of challenges using an older facility.” Executive Hackel adds, “All along, we wondered what we would do with this jail. It was a complex facility. Whenever they needed beds, they built beds. It looked like Alcatraz.” Efforts to design and fund a new correctional facility started in 2005, but the team had initial problems solidifying funding for such a large-scale project. Hackel was elected sheriff in 2001 and served until 2010, when he chose to stand for the newly created position of County Executive in Macomb County. “I adored being the sheriff,” he says. “Running for the role of county executive was not something I wanted to do. They created this new form of government, they created this executive office, but I knew that if I wasn’t doing it, the person coming in would be coming at it as a partisan. I had no interest in that.” Wickersham was elected sheriff in 2012.

In 2013, Sheriff Wickersham and Executive Hackel started working with consultants on a feasibility analysis for a more effective intake and evaluation center, new and updated mental health facility, and better pre-trial processes. The improvements to both facilities and processes were undertaken with a particular focus on mental health. According to Hackel, “They closed a lot of mental-health institutions in Michigan in the 1980s under the assumption that there would be community support for those individuals, and there wasn’t. The hospitals weren’t ready, law enforcement wasn’t ready. We’re addressing the structural issue, but what are we doing with the processing piece of that, who is going to be there to make the assessments that are carried out 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? We use civilians, community partners and experts. What are we doing with community-based support, who do we hand them off to? The beauty of it is that nobody talks about the wraparound services, but we call it community action. People who come into contact with law enforcement are going to be there for a while, and they have people at home who need help, so who is helping them?”

Still, funding for improvements remained elusive. Finally, in 2020, the American Rescue Plan provided a route to major improvements in Macomb County. According to Sheriff Wickersham, “After COVID, we decided that we weren’t going to get a brand-new facility but could we down-size it, get a central intake, assessing whether inmates needed to be in jail or diverted, we’ve increased our community correction unit who do pre-trial services and try and reduce jail-bed days. We came up with a smaller project. The county came into ARPA money and it fit our parameters and fit our project, we were dealing with substance use and mental health, so the state of Michigan allotted $40 million for the project and the county also contributed.” The end result was the Macomb County Jail Central Intake and Referral Center, a state-of-the-art centralized communications facility and the Safe and Healthy Macomb initiative, run through centralized intake and wraparound case management, managed by the county jail with community partners. The centralized communications center was of particular importance to Executive Hackel because, he says, “as a dispatcher, I wondered why we have all these different dispatch centers. With all the experience I had in law enforcement, dispatch is still my favorite place to be.” The presentation of the Sutin Award was fittingly held in the COMTEC Building on March 12, 2024.

When asked for advice for other jurisdictions interested in pursuing such wide-ranging innovations in a county jail setting, Sheriff Wickersham said, “You cannot quit. You have to be persistent. You can’t take no for an answer, because in this situation, we know that this isn’t a popular project. People do not want to spend money on jails. If I were to take no for an answer, I’m failing my men and women, the people who are being sent here, and the trust that the people put in me. You’ll have more headaches, more issues, and more litigation. While we’re supervising these individuals we’re doing the best we can to take care of them within the facility but also when they leave, we’re doing our best to give them services so that they’re not just going in the front door and coming in the back.”

The L. Anthony Sutin Award for Innovative Law Enforcement and Community Partnerships is bestowed on partnerships in which law enforcement is actively engaged with the community in a multifaceted manner that has been sustained over time and has resulted in positive, observable public safety outcomes or advances in public trust. The award is named in memory of Tony Sutin, who served as a founder and Deputy Director of the COPS Office from its creation in 1994 until 1996. After serving as the Principal Deputy to the Associate Attorney General of the United States, then as acting Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs, he joined the faculty of the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, in 1999. He quickly became dean and served in that capacity until his untimely death on January 16, 2002.

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