Whisenant Challenging Cannon for Sheriff

Anthony "Mark" Whisenant says the Charleston County Sheriff's Office needs some changes, and he has a plan to make them happen.

Whisenant filed Friday to run as a Democrat for Charleston County Sheriff, in a race that will pit him against his one-time boss. He served as deputy for eight years starting in 1997, some of that time he also spent deployed to Iraq as a chief warrant officer in the Coast Guard Reserve.

"After coming back from serving my country over in the desert with the United States Coast Guard I noticed there needed to be some changes made," Whisenant said. "The only way I'm going to be able to effectively do it is become the sheriff myself."

Whisenant said there are not enough deputies patrolling roads in Charleston County, and he would restructure the Sheriff's Office command staff to create more deputy positions, something he said wouldn't require any additional funding to implement.

"There is a deficiency on the road, and that's the backbone of law enforcement," he said. "Currently, normally at any given time, I'll just give Mount Pleasant as an example, you only have two deputies patrolling the area of Mount Pleasant."

"It's not only Mount Pleasant, North Charleston is faced with the same issues, there's not enough sufficient manpower out to take care of the general public," Whisenant added. "And also it's an officer safety issue."

Whisenant said he also wants to bring back youth programs like D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), programs that focus on high risk juveniles. He also wants to bring back a community service program that focuses on crime watch efforts.

"I also want to implement a program that's going to focus on the elderly, especially elderly that has no loved ones left behind, and look out for them and make sure they're not taken advantage of," he said.

Whisenant is also concerned about the number of outstanding arrest warrants the Sheriff's Office has on file, approximately 46,000 of them, a number he got from the Sheriff's Office through Freedom of Information Act requests, he said. By contrast, he said there were only about 41,000 outstanding arrest warrants the previous year, a difference of about 5,000.

He said he also wants to overhaul the office's training programs.

"With my background I want to implement sustainment training for the people who are freshly out of the academy to the veterans out there where we do reality based training, like precision driving, like use of force situations, where you're not just sitting in a classroom watching a videotape not getting anything out of it," Whisenant said.

"That's going to better aid the officer out there, and be fairer to the citizens, where the officer doesn't have a chance to either over-react or not react appropriately where his safety could be at issue too."

Finally Whisenant said the Sheriff's Office needs to modernize as well. He said he wants to put laptop computers in the patrol cars so deputies have to return to a squad room to retype hand-written reports, rather they could file the report from their cars and not have to leave the road.

Correction: An earlier version erroneously put the number of outstanding arrest warrants for 2010 at 5,000. A miscomunication between Patch.com and Whisenant led to the confusion. The candidate's point was there was an increase of about 5,000 outstanding warrants between 2010 and 2011. We regret the error.