COPS Office Announces Recipients of 2024 L. Anthony Sutin Award for Innovative
Law Enforcementand Community Partnerships

Honoring the Lancaster County (South Carolina) Sheriff’s Office with the Coalition for Healthy Youth and the Macomb County (Michigan) Sheriff’s Office with the Macomb County Executive

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) today announced the two recipients of the 2024 L. Anthony Sutin Award for Innovative Law Enforcement and Community Partnerships. They are:

• Lancaster County (South Carolina) Sheriff’s Office with the Coalition for Healthy Youth; and
• Macomb County (Michigan) Sheriff’s Office with the Macomb County Executive.

“Building successful partnerships provides the framework for success for community policing,” said Hugh T. Clements, Jr., Director of the COPS Office. “Partnerships like the ones we are honoring today show what can happen when trusting, respectful environments are created between law enforcement and the many organizations and agencies that are critical to a community’s success. Today’s award winners demonstrate what success in the area looks like.”

In 1998, the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office formed a partnership with six individuals to address problem youth behaviors such as substance abuse, delinquency, violence, teen pregnancy prevention and gang affiliation. Under the leadership of Sheriff Barry Faile, that group has now grown to include over 40 public, private, civic, corporate, and faith-based entities. It has become one of the most prolific and effective efforts in this arena in South Carolina, gaining national attention, and helping thousands since its inception. From working with schools to promote public safety, to assisting with substance abuse prevention efforts, to addressing the opioid epidemic and commensurate crime associated with drug trafficking, the partnership has had a profound and measurable impact on the community.

The partnership between Macomb County Sheriff Anthony Wickersham and County Executive Mark A. Hackel began in the early 1980s when they were both young patrol Macomb County Deputy Sheriffs. They formed a pact committing that their careers would make transformative changes to the county-wide criminal justice system, and they have done just that. Reaching out and collaborating with municipal units of government resulted in the first community contractual partnership for community-oriented policing in Harrison Township. Additional collaborative contracts with community-based providers to deliver a myriad of services were soon established. In recent years, the partnership has brought about transformational change in the areas of criminal justice, public health, community action and infrastructure improvements. Working together, the team has modernized and re-invented community service offerings to target the daily needs of the most vulnerable citizens of Macomb County.

The L. Anthony Sutin Award for Innovative Law Enforcement and Community Partnerships recognizes the efforts of innovative and sustained law enforcement and community partnerships whose unique collaborations have transformed public safety in their communities. This award is bestowed on those 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.

The COPS Office is the federal component of the Department of Justice responsible for advancing community policing nationwide. The only Department of Justice agency with policing in its name, the COPS Office was established in 1994 and has been the cornerstone of the nation’s crime fighting strategy with grants, a variety of knowledge resource products, and training and technical assistance. Through the years, the COPS Office has become the go-to organization for law enforcement agencies across the country and continues to listen to the field and provide the resources that are needed to reduce crime and build trust between law enforcement and the communities served. The COPS Office has been appropriated more than $20 billion to advance community policing, including grants awarded to more than 13,000 state, local, territorial, and tribal law enforcement agencies to fund the hiring and redeployment of approximately 138,000 officers.

###