Mundo in the morning on 95.7 FM KCMO Talk Radio. We are live at the Johnson County Sheriff's Department for our Back the Blue Tour stop number 11, our first stop of the 2026 calendar year. And we are happy to welcome on and say good morning to Sergeant Ryan Garcia, Community Policing Unit, and Deputy James Smathers with the Take Me Home program here in Johnson County. So these guys both do a lot of work with the kids across Johnson County. And Sergeant Garcia, I want to start with you. You oversee the SROs, the school resource officers, and Johnson County is doing a lot of work in the Spring Hill School District and also contract for DeSoto. So listen, every parent thinks about this stuff, unfortunately. What is the world like for you overseeing SROs and how has that entire unit in some respects changed over the last several years as you try to keep kids safe across Johnson County? The biggest influence with SROs is the speed of social media. Social media posts can completely change your day. whether or not it's real, whether or not it's a credible threat to a school, or whether or not it's a new trend called swatting that some people are somewhat familiar with where someone puts out some sort of a threat and an SRO and supporting staff have to go and follow up that threat and make sure that it is actually a credible threat or deemed uncredible. And that's something, gosh, we had one of those here recently somewhere in the area. But that's becoming more popular partially because of social media and the phones? That's correct, yeah. Wow. So then what about the safety of the schools themselves? I mean, all schools now do have layers of safety. It's not like even when I was growing up where you could walk out to your car and grab lunch and leave. How much more cognizant of all that do you now have to be in that role? All of the schools have camera systems. Those are systems that are sophisticated. They are recorded. They are upgraded routinely as money allows for the districts that we serve. And they are nine times out of ten the best way to see what happened when we only have one SRO per high school, so they can't be everywhere at once. So when an incident is reported, they're what we rely on quite heavily. However, there are other systems in place. And then there a really good working relationship between the SRO and the school staff How about building a relationship with the kids in the schools How has that been in a social media age for these SROs when you can see things on social media that are half or not true at all How do you build that relationship with the kids in today's world? The SROs receive training and are just personable people. That's part of the profile when we select them to be an SRO. They receive training on how to interact with children. I believe all of our SROs, all but one, have kids at home. So their parents, they understand the concerns that parents have, things of that nature. When they walk into the different grade levels, there's, of course, a different response per age level. But at elementary school, our SROs are the rock stars of the school. They're heroes, right? Oh, yeah, they're awesome. Middle school, you know, it's a little bit further distance, a little bit further gap, but they still interact with the kids. and high school, you know, kind of too cool for them. Yeah. But still interact with problems. And there are kids that we have had that have gone from kindergarten all the way up through high school and have known the SROs just because their career has spanned that length of time. So, and that's kind of neat to see that full circle relationship where kids will either have a great respect for law enforcement as a result of that or they will get into law enforcement, actually. That's awesome. That's what it's all about. So now we've also got Deputy James Smathers here. He works with the Take Me Home. I don't know what you'd call it, an organization, or what is Take Me Home exactly? So I'd probably refer to it as a program. What we do with the Take Me Home program is we take information from citizens on family members, dependents, children, or adults who might have communication difficulties, things like autism spectrum disorder or aging-related cognitive decline. These people tend to wander off. They can get lost. And when we come across in the community, one of our main responsibilities as law enforcement is to help keep our community members safe and be able to get these people back home to their families and to their caretakers. And so through the Take Me Home program, we'll record names. We'll take down photographs if family members want to provide them, addresses, behaviors, communication styles, any information that might be helpful on these people in case they wander off. And one of our officers is the only person who's able to have contact with them so we can help get them back home. So it could be kids with autism. It could be elderly people with Alzheimer's. I mean, anything and everything in between, right? Absolutely. We have we place no limits on on what we can we can record with this information. The only the only real guidelines that we try and put out is that we want people with cognitive or communications related difficulties. So one thing we're pushing really hard right now is that it's not just children. One of the big things in the mental health awareness scene right now is youth with autism So we getting a lot of applicants and submissions for people with children with autism or other cognitive disabilities but it not just children Those older family members who are starting to lose track of where they're at, who might find themselves wandering off, trying to go to different locations that they're familiar with from their past and may not be able to navigate themselves back home, those people need our help just as much. And I was just Googling it here. If you just type in Johnson County Take Me Home program, It shows up so anyone can do that. It's a free service that is provided by the Johnson County Sheriff's Office. Give me an example, if you could, Deputy, as to how the Take Me Home program has successfully expedited, you know, a missing child or a missing elderly person. And it really seems to potentially save time and resources in the process. It absolutely does. And I actually work in the dispatch division as part of my day job. So I have a lot of personal experience with using the Take Me Home program in a practical sense. One of the ways that our program works is that once we've entered someone into our database, if we've associated an address with them, we can do a geographic search. So if we locate someone out in the community who appears to have some kind of communication disability and appears confused or doesn't know where they're at, we can do a geographic search based on where they were located and check for any submissions to our Take Me Home program within that, like a certain radius around that location. and actually just a couple months ago we had an officer find a child out in Gardner who was unable to speak they weren't able to communicate where they were at or who they were where they need to get home to so we did a geographic search on on the sort of the intersection where they'd been located and about three blocks away we found an entry in our database for that the photograph matched the child the officer was out with and we were able to reunify that child with their parents that's amazing so those parents had their child in the take me home program database already yes Which made this a much easier process for you and obviously for them. Absolutely. And before, if they weren't in the database and we hadn't had that access to the photograph of this child and the other information where they were supposed to be, it could have taken days or longer to try and locate where the parents were at. Wow. That's fantastic. Because he had traveled multiple blocks away from his house. When they're close to the house, we can canvas the neighborhood. But the distance he was at it, we would have had to put out social media posts and maybe contacted local schools to try and get information. So this feels like a great opportunity for parents who either have young children who have some of these barriers or elderly parents as well who might be in Johnson County, right? Both sides of the spectrum work. Absolutely, yeah. And like I said, we're pushing really hard right now to try and get those older people with Alzheimer's or dementia, other cognitive decline, who may need this resource as well. because it's easy to forget that these people can need help sometimes as well because we've seen them in our lives as these strong parent figures who can handle themselves and take care of themselves. And it important to keep in mind that it our responsibility as they aging to help take care of them as well And this applies to anybody in the county right This is not just for our county area this is anyone Absolutely and we don even limit it to just Johnson County So if anyone lives in Miami County, close to Spring Hill, Douglas County, close to the border, even up in KCK or on the Missouri side, we are not going to say no to you just because you don't live within the borders of Johnson County. Okay, that's great. So just type in Johnson County Take Me Home program into Google, and it's the first link that you'll see there. So, Ryan, back to what you do with the community policing unit, what else falls under your purview beyond the school resource officers and how you guys work together with the communities here across Johnson County? Well, we've got three city contracted cars. What occurs with smaller cities is the sheriff's office will obtain contracts for law enforcement services, and we do that in the city of DeSoto, where we've got two cars that are contracted, and the city of Edgerton, where we've got one. I supervise those three deputies, and then I also have three deputies that are, oh, more or less catch-alls. They do presentations. They interact with the public. They do that through community outreach. I've got one that actually springboards off the Take Me Home program with the Blue Envelope program for, say, a cognitive decline individual gets in a car and just starts driving. Unplanned trip kind of thing, and they end up in Johnson County. Well, if they have a blue envelope in their glove box where family members have filled everything out, emergency contact included, then law enforcement, when they encounter them, can then make contact with the family much easier than trying to backtrack where they came from, how long they've been driving, those kinds of things. So that's the blue envelope program is what it's called. And anyone can sign up for that in Johnson County as well? Yes, much the same type of parameters as Deputy Smathers. Well, you guys, as you see just more growth, DeSoto obviously building that Panasonic plant, Edgerton the same thing. I got to imagine those guys are busier than ever with just the growth that you're seeing in some of these outskirts of Johnson County. Is that true? Oh, absolutely. With all of the growth, and then we had FIFA this year. We are constantly doing presentations. We are constantly doing community events. There's always a demand for community outreach, and we love that because it, on a much greater scale, establishes trust, establishes just that relational familiarity between law enforcement and members of the community. That's great. Well, we appreciate both of you guys coming in and being part of the show. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. Got Sergeant Ryan Garcia, Community Policing Unit, and Deputy James Smathers, a dispatcher with the Take Me Home program here in Johnson County. coming up speaking of the world cup uh there are some monetary concerns that keep coming up we'll get to those and give you the details on it coming up next right here on kcmo
