By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
Brandon Twp.- Oakland County Sheriff’s Office Brandon substation commander Lieutenant Greg Glover presented his 2017 year end activity report to the township board on Monday night.
The substation has seen an increase in calls—807 more than 2016 to be exact.
The substation, which has a staff of 13, is averaging 19-20 calls per day, 134 calls per week. The calls were broken down with 5,754 for the township and 1,210 for the Village of Ortonville for a total of 6,964 calls. In 2016, the number of calls was 6,157.
“The department across the board has been short staffed,” said Glover. “This [the number of calls] is significant because of the increase it places on the detective bureau. The more calls you have, the more investigations that are involved.”
The station had an increase in traffic citations in 2017 of 523 tickets, including warning citations, which Glover attributes to heavy police presence on M-15. He also says that is the reason that their arrests of drivers operating under the influence of alcohol or drugs has gone down, with 17 arrests in 2017 compared to 39 in 2016.

“I think it’s made a huge impact on who is leaving what bars and when,” he said. “We’ve tried to keep a heavier presence on the back roads, I know that a lot of complaints come in here as far as the speeders on the back roads. We don’t get a lot of time to be proactive with sending someone on a back road and working radar. I’ve tried to do it myself, especially in the morning before school hours when kids are at the bus stops.”
There were also an increase in incidents within Brandon school district for which they requested help from the school liaison officer Detective Rich Hubble, with a fraction of those resulting in reports for investigation.
“One of the reasons those numbers are high is that with a school liaison, just about any time that they call and ask for an officer to be involved for an interview or talk with one of the students, I’ve had them take a number,” said Glover. “I’ve made it very clear to the school that if you’re going to tie up one of my officers that’s the same as tying up one of our road patrol. If that school liaison was not there, I’d have to pull somebody from the road patrol for those incidents.”
Though the majority of these incidents were at the high school, there were still incidents in all of the schools across the board, including Brandon Fletcher, which closed at the end of the 2016-2017 school year.
Michigan Incident Crime Reporting reported 221 criminal offenses that were handled in the township. One hundred and thirteen of those ended in arrest and 18 were exceptionally cleared, which means no prosecution was sought. Those statistics give township one of the highest clearance rates, 59.3 percent, on all reported offenses, compared to the Oakland County substation average of 48.3 percent.
“Brandon Township still had one of the highest clearance rates in the county,” said Glover. “I’m very proud of the work that the guys assigned to this substation have done. It’s been a very busy year, it’s been a trying year, and if it wasn’t for their hard work and dedication to the township, we wouldn’t have the clearance rate that we have with clearing major cases with arrest.”