Sheriff Jack Hall gives 'State of the Sheriff's Office' address to Avon-Avon Lake GOP

AVON — In his first "State of the Sheriff's Office" speech of his first term, Lorain County Sheriff Jack Hall told the Avon-Avon Lake Republican Club on Thursday night that 2025 was a busy first year. A Republican elected in 2024, Hall said crime is down, falling 3.3 percent from 2024 to 2025. "You told us what you wanted and we gave it to you," Hall told the crowd, sharing facts and figures. The sheriff's office is fully staffed for the first time since 2006, he said, with hundreds of applicants seeking to fill the few job openings he had last year. Fifty-seven of Hall's 111 deputies are in the uniformed patrol division. In total they responded to 38,650 calls in 2025, and are now responding to traffic crashes and doing crash reconstruction — something the sheriff's office previously left in the hands of the state Highway Patrol, Hall said. Major Crimes Task Force detectives initiated 356 investigations in 2025, he said, and Drug Task Force agents saw saw 24 cases indicted through county grand juries. Sixty kilograms of cocaine were seized, along with 684 pounds of illegal marijuana and marijuana concentrate, Hall said. The two deputies in his Sex Offender Enforcement Unit oversaw 591 registered adult sex offenders and 28 juvenile sex offenders and made sure they complied with their registration requirements. The HEAL Human Trafficking Task Force — Huron, Erie, Ashland and Lorain counties — working out of his office is one of 11 statewide. It made 23 arrests in 2025 and rescued more than 40 victims of human trafficking, Hall said. His Public Corruption Unit has 37 ongoing cases, with several expected to result in criminal charges in the coming weeks, he said. Deputies working on the Northern Border Initiative with state and federal partners apprehended 114 undocumented immigrants, focusing on those involved "explicitly" in criminal activity such as human trafficking, drug trafficking and labor trafficking, Hall said. Eighty-six were under deportation orders and 24 were either convicted felons or had warrants out for their arrest, Hall said. The Lorain County Jail is now fully staffed with 100 corrections officers. Hall's corrections inspector general has investigated 63 cases of alleged wrongdoing by staff. Eleven of those cases have resulted in disciplinary action and three in criminal charges. "We take the rights of our inmates in the Lorain County Jail very seriously," Hall said. The jail is required to provide inmates their prescribed medications while they're in the sheriff's custody. Hall said his office was able to cut those costs from $88,000 per month in 2024 to $16,000 per month in 2025 through a state purchasing program. And "I wasn't named in a single lawsuit" in 2025, Hall said. Coming later this year is a sheriff's Mounted Unit — funded entirely by voluntary community donations — with deputies on horseback to help with crowd control and community relations. Hall said $80,000 in donations have already been received and an upcoming tack sale fundraiser is expected to bring in more. Moving into the 21st century, Hall's office is using artificial intelligence software, or AI, to speed up the process of redacting victim information from videos and photos that are part of public records requests. Redacting private victim information from body-worn or dashboard camera videos once took hours. That now "takes minutes," he said. Contact Dave O'Brien at (440) 329-7129 or dobrien@chroniclet.com