Battle Ground Police Chief Dennis Flynn and Clark County Sheriff John Horch collaborated for a town hall to highlight the department’s partnership, staffing updates, and latest uses of police technology and answer questions from community members who attended on Wednesday, April 23, at the Battle Ground Event Center.
“There are no walls between Battle Ground, Clark County, Ridgefield, Camas, Washougal, we all have individual police agencies, but the crime moves around, it doesn’t matter,” Horch said. “The drugs move around. So if we can do something here in Battle Ground, it doesn’t matter whether it’s in unincorporated Clark County, I could care less because we’re getting out of our community and we’re keeping people safe.”
Flynn told the crowd that Battle Ground is not unique to the fentanyl crisis, and the issues are very real. In 2023, four overdoses were attributed to fentanyl, and four more in 2024 are suspected fentanyl overdoses, but reports from the coroner’s office have not been completed yet.
To start 2025, Flynn said the Clark County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) special investigations unit completed nine drug busts, served 18 search warrants, and made five drug-related arrests in Battle Ground.
“All of that are cases in which we have reached out to them and asked for their help,” Flynn said. “Every single time that we called the sheriff’s office and said, ‘Can you,’ and before I can even finish, they said, ‘Yes, tell us what you need from us.’”
To enhance service in all of Clark County, Horch has asked the County Council to fund 90 new deputies as the sheriff’s office only has 0.64 deputies per 1,000 residents — the lowest in the region. Horch responded to a community question about how long it may take for CCSO to reach fully staffed status.
“If enough money was available, it would probably take, fully staffed, six, seven, eight years,” he said. “We can only bring on so many people at one time, train them …”
The CCSO staffing report states that, on some nights, just four deputies are responsible for protecting 245,000 people across 512 square miles of Clark County. In 2024, there were at least 11 occasions with just four deputies on patrol, the report adds.
CCSO would need to add 147 additional deputies to their current staffing totals to match the national average of 2.8 deputies per 1,000 people for county agencies. In Washington state as a whole, the average is 1.24 per 1,000, CCSO cuts that dramatically low number in half.
In addition to asking for 90 new deputy positions to be hired over six years, Horch asked the County Council for 24 non-sworn professional staff positions.
Flynn mentioned similar situations in Battle Ground when a substantial traffic accident occurs; for an amount of time on the scene, no officers are left available for calls for service.
“If you have a domestic, that’s a two-officer response,” Flynn said. “If you have two officers on duty, that’s it. Every other call will have to wait.”
Flynn said that in the last 12 years, Battle Ground’s population has risen almost 26 percent, while the police department has not proportionately increased to match the population increase. Despite that, Battle Ground still has the most officers per capita in Clark County, with 1.34 per 1,000 people.
