Following an extraordinary and problematic year-and-a-half for Camden County policing, Sheriff Jim Proctor is now facing his first competition to re-election in a decade.
His challengers — former Camden County Sheriff’s Office Maj. Kevin Chaney and County Commissioner Trevor Readdick — are running as Republicans and will square off in the May 21 state primary. In November, the winner will face Proctor, who is running as an Independent.
The two challengers said they have entered what has normally been a staid race due to an avalanche of scandal at the county jail and multiple investigations against Proctor’s deputies. Since November 2022 state police have charged six Camden deputies and jailors for violent incidents. Taxpayers have faced the brunt of stiff financial penalties levied due to these incidents especially after the county’s insurer declined to renew its policy last summer due to the use-of-force incidents and frequently wrecked police cruisers. The insurers renegotiated more expensive rates for the county amid six figure payouts to settle lawsuits.
The challengers cite accountability and taxpayer responsibility as their key campaign planks.
For voters in the county of approximately 58,000 people that votes heavily Republican, the most distinguishing features among the candidates may be their professional experiences and their positions about county budgets in the wake of the law enforcement scandals.
For his part, Proctor has laid out a platform in which he has promised to increase mandatory training for jailors and patrol deputies. He counts among his successes his victory to secure raises for jailors in a hard-fought battle with county commissioners – including Readdick – and making use of his limited funds to keep the jail from falling apart.
Proctor points to wasteful stewardship of taxpayer dollars by county officials, from the failed Spaceport initiative to the Public Service Authority fraud, as a key reason for underfunding and, therefore, issues stemming from the jail.
Running the sheriff’s office like a business
Readdick, a lifelong Camden County resident, went into the family business of construction after graduating from Georgia Southern University with a degree in construction management in 2011.
The following year, he started his own company. Before turning to homebuilding, Readdick said his company got its start by purchasing foreclosed houses and flipping them for profit.
Readdick says he wants to provide the same financial turnaround for the Camden County Sheriff’s Office, an agency that makes up one-quarter of the county’s total budget but has struggled with low staffing, poor morale, and dilapidated jail infrastructure.
Elected in 2020 to the county commission and a member of the budget committee, Readdick said he understands how to responsibly manage the department.
“Everybody says, ‘we need more money, we need more money’,” Readdick said, “More money doesn’t always necessarily fix everything. It’s about how you can spend that money efficiently and effectively to accomplish your mission.”
Sheriff Proctor and county officials were locked in an 18-month legal battle over funding, after Proctor sued the Board of Commissioners for allegedly underfunding his budget.
As a constitutional officer, the sheriff is independently elected and required by Georgia law to discharge their duties. The county commission sets the budget for county agencies and constitutional officers, like the sheriff, and are required by law to fund them adequately, while also keeping a balanced budget.
The county chairman at the time, as well as other commissioners including Readdick, denied the pay increases Proctor sought because they would have caused the sheriff to exceed his allocated budget by more than 20%, according to an article in the Tribune and Georgian newspaper.
In September 2023, the sheriff and county reached an agreement to raise jailor pay in the upcoming budget. The county reimbursed the sheriff for legal fees incurred from the lawsuit — approximately $29,500, Readdick said.
As a result of the deal, Proctor said starting pay for jailors increased from “$14 and some change” per hour to $20 per hour when they become certified. It’s a change he hopes will increase the quality of jailors and their morale, leading to fewer incidents of violence.
Readdick, however, says the key to change is a culture of accountability and investing in the organization, which he pledged to deliver.
The businessman says that one of his first changes, if elected, would be “zero tolerance on excessive force, stopping the PIT maneuvers” and bringing in the county’s human resources department to create more communication with the county.
PIT maneuvers are a pursuit technique used by police. They are effective at stopping a chase but at the cost of damaging their vehicles, as well as endangering the officer’s own life, the pursued driver and other cars on the road. Excessive PIT maneuvers by Camden deputies were cited as a major reason the county’s insurer dropped them as a client.
“That’s kind of the joke is, ‘Oh, send them to Camden, they’ll stop them.’” Readdick said, “And it’s 2024. We’ve got to stop wrecking our cars because they’re expensive. There’s other methods with today’s technologies to stop the offender’s car.”
Readdick acknowledges that critics bring up his lack of any law enforcement experience. He said he has been talking with sheriffs in Georgia to get a better sense of the job. He says one piece of advice he received was: “Law enforcement is 90% doing the right thing and treating people fairly, he said, and the other 10%, you’ll learn.”
He plans to hire an experienced command staff who will handle the day-to-day and earn the trust of rank-and-file officers by running the organization competently, Readdick said.
As to the 2021 controversy with the Kingsland Police Department, where news reports described how Commissioner Readdick asked for “special consideration” for his undocumented worker who was pulled over by police, Readdick said his comment was taken out of context. He said his worker was following the law and Readdick was advocating for him.
“I wasn’t asking for any special favors,” Readdick said. “I was just asking for them to abide by the same law that is universal.”
Focus on restoring trust
Born in Fort Benning, Chaney’s family moved to Camden County and raised him there. He served in the Army, before joining the sheriff’s office in August 1995. Chaney spent more than two decades at the Camden County Sheriff’s Office with a large chunk of it spent in Savannah working on the Drug Enforcement Agency task force.
Chaney eventually was promoted to major and oversaw the criminal investigations unit (CID) and patrol. Chaney transferred to the main office in Woodbine in 2021, which is when he said he began to witness issues first hand.
According to Chaney, he petitioned the sheriff and then started changing the nearly 20-year-old office policies and procedures. That had not finished by the time he left in 2022. Proctor says it’s still being worked on.
“It’s a great tool to have for grants down the road. It also helps keep your officers in line,” Chaney said.
Modern policies, he said, are key for accountability, something the sheriff’s office is lacking: “That’s why I think that the jail slipped away because there’s no accountability inside that jail. None.”
When he worked as a major, a high-level position in a law enforcement agency akin to an executive, Chaney said damaging information was siloed.
He said he didn’t learn about the September 2022 jail beating incident of Jarrett Hobbs, which is now the subject of a federal probe, until someone sent him the YouTube video a month later.
“I called the sheriff and said ‘hey, have you seen the video?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’ve just seen it. Somebody sent it to me.’ So I said ‘hey, we need to talk.’ So I went to his house,” Chaney said.
Chaney said he volunteered to lead the internal investigation into the deputies, three of whom were fired around the time of the arrest.
Even alleged misconduct in his own division, patrol, was not immediately reported to Chaney, he claimed.
In January 2022, former deputy Christine “Christi” Newman pulled a handcuffed woman by her hair and slammed her head into a police cruiser, dash camera video shows. According to disciplinary documents obtained by The Current, a supervisor reprimanded Newman with two days of unpaid leave. The discipline was approved by the patrol captain at the time, Cedric Brown.
Chaney said he wasn’t made aware of the incident until a week later. He didn’t see the body camera footage, he said, until it went viral seven months later.
Reporting by The Current about a separate traffic stop involving Newman spurred the local NAACP chapter to look further into Newman’s disciplinary history, when they received the dash camera footage. The footage made waves online, and the NAACP chapter shared it with the Brunswick Judicial Circuit District Attorney Keith Higgins. The DA’s office presented the case to a grand jury in January 2023, and jurors returned an indictment against Newman. The case is still pending.
Chaney said after this happened, he sat down with Capt. Brown to put in place a use-of-force form that has to be filled out after any force incident; it also included a body camera review. The force incident would have to be reviewed by multiple supervisors, and the major would decide whether to assign it for an internal investigation.
This type of review is a standard of modern policing and is how agencies like the Savannah Police Department and Glynn County Police Department conduct internal affairs investigations.
Chaney said it has been difficult to watch the sheriff’s department garner a toxic reputation.
“That’s my home,” Chaney said. “My entire adult life is in that agency.”
He said members of the public used to look at the Camden County Sheriff’s office badge with pride, but not anymore.
“They’re just disgusted with it,” he said, “Because there’s stuff that’s hidden that don’t get brought up.”
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