Doolittle Addresses Walden Men’s club; Speaks on Road Rage Incident in Magnolia

Speaking to the Men’s Association of Walden this past Friday, May 2nd, Montgomery County Sheriff Wesley Doolittle gave a general talk about the current issues that the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office faces. Being a career law enforcement officer, and with a family history in the county dating back well over 120 years, Doolittle is committed to the safety of Montgomery County citizens. The Walden Men’s Club, headed by local businessman Pete Livingston, meets the First Friday of each month at Walden’s Lakeview Dining restaurant, inviting influential speakers of interest to the men, and women, who wish to attend the breakfast meeting. Guests range from elected officials to people who are experts in different fields.

Sheriff Doolittle is very involved in getting to know the citizens of Montgomery County and their concerns. He worked the room, going around to each table and introducing himself, shaking the hand of each person in the room, which included approximately three ladies, who were most welcomed to the event. The Sheriff spoke on different topics, but downplayed the recent road rage incident in Magnolia in which he apprehended a suspect who displayed a gun in a fight with another motorist at an intersection in the town.

Doolittle’s outlook in regards to getting to know people started when he was stationed in Victoria, along the coastline. He worked in a five county area, and he didn’t know anyone at first. It was in 2009 he solved his first capital murder case in Yoakum. The Sheriff appreciates talking to people and especially clubs, because he understands that members chat amongst themselves and form a community within a community; helping each other on the smaller issues. It goes along with his commitment to ensure that Our County is safe for all citizens to live, work, and workshop as they so please.

After assuming office, Doolittle released a statement that The MCSO will remain committed to the federal 287(g) program, which allows trained and certified sheriff’s personnel to ‘perform certain immigration enforcement functions.’

“I think it is vitally important to remain committed to transparency in the community,” said Doolittle. “So that you the citizen can know what exactly is going on in the Sheriff’s Office in Montgomery County.”

The Sheriff issued the statement on immigration on February 3rd, after inquiries into the new administration’s position on immigration enforcement. It falls in line with sheriff’s dating back to 1996, when Sheriff Tommy Gage first installed the program to keep Montgomery County safe. Conroe has two ICE Centers, the ‘Montgomery County ICE Processing Center,’ and the ‘Joe Corley Processing Center,’ where they combine for up to several thousands detainees per day according to an Axios report from March 11th. Sheriff Doolittle explained the complete process in how illegal migrants are arrested, housed, justice adjudicated, and coordinated for handing over the illegals to ICE for deportation. He has also expressed interest in installing a warrants removal officer to coordinate with the feds if a detained illegal migrant has a federal warrant, then the government will be contacted and the individual transferred to ICE custody.

The MCSO is currently fully staffed, with only a few openings, which is a triumph, as compared to certain entities nationwide that are bleeding officers due to bad local and state government policies that are more partial to alleged criminals than they are to the spirit of common sense law. In January, The Sheriff announced his office received over 200 applications for employment, with more received everyday.
“We have taken talent from every large law enforcement agency surrounding Montgomery County,” said The Sheriff. “A lot of people who work in the counties surrounding ours, want to come and work in the county in which they live, and I want to provide them with opportunities if possible.”

Sheriff Doolittle has expectations of his deputies and civilian employees, and is not afraid of making changes to bring up new leaders to bring a team up to snuff. He has hired a leadership team particularly Captains and Chiefs that have capabilities in certain areas that are well versed in leadership experiences to judge expectations of deputies and the professionalism they display.
In the Communications Division, the Sheriff has made changes as well, giving dispatchers the authority to act as sheriff to redirect units who are near an active scene to be set as support if needed at the dispatcher’s discretion. It’s Doolittle’s contribution to thinking outside the box for the citizens of Montgomery County. While running for office, he discovered that dispatchers missed over one-hundred-fifty thousand 991 calls over a five year period which deeply concerned him, and in 2024, over thirty-thousand emergency calls were missed. The Sheriff’s office answers 82% of 911 calls outside of Conroe, and in April, his dispatchers answered 35,000 calls. He discovered that his dispatchers were physically calling back any missed calls, so the sheriff’s department invested in hardware and software for an automated system to call back which helps with manpower issues. In addition, all calls to the MCSO were routed to dispatch, but now the new system weeds out non-emergency calls to dispatch with the addition of a new call center saving ten-thousand calls to the dispatch center per month. With Doolittle’s work smarter not harder approach, it is making a difference in the sheriff’s department. The time waiting on a 911 call has been reduced by 50%, and calls for police or fire assistance were being hung on for up to five minutes by a dispatcher before being transferred to a secondary answering point.

“We have reduced the time for an emergency phone down to two minutes,” said Sheriff Doolittle. “And working with the software to transfer the calls faster, plus with changing the policy, we are verifying the information, and getting the call to the service it needs to be at.”

The MCSO is answering 94% of all 991 calls within the first 15 seconds, 97% within the first 20 seconds, which beats national standards for emergency calls. It is the first time it’s been done before in the history of the MCSO. For Voice Over IP calls, which do not have a number attached, they are unable to call back because the number is not identified on their system.

Sheriff Doolittle has changed the organizational structure of the MCSO, by creating an Assistant Chief, and three bureaus: Support, Operations, Justice, with Chiefs in charge of those departments. The chief’s answer to the Chief Deputy via a span-of-control for behavior and job conduct, so if there are problems the Sheriff has a baseline of information to look back on to make adjustments as needed.

For overnight duties, the MCSO has made changes as well, with around 300 personnel on duty, and the highest ranking sheriff’s deputy on duty was a Sergeant, which concerned Doolittle. He worked with the Commissioners Court, and was able to create a Night Command, with a Captain and two Lieutenants who work nights, and cover the whole county attending to all the overnight scenes from homicides to citizen complaints. The move allows Night Command to act as the Sheriff during the overnight hours, and make the best use of resources at their discretion from an actual scene. Of course, for the major events, the Sheriff and his Captains will respond as necessary.

Sheriff Doolittle is working to create a full-time Traffic Unit, which consisted of 4 deputies and a sergeant, and with over 800 thousand residents in Montgomery County, the need for a specialty unit to work accidents instead of relying on patrol deputies to be called off their beat became necessary. The Sheriff is repurposing twelve deputies in The Woodlands Division to the Traffic Unit in addition to the current deputies and sergeant. He will also be asking the County Commissioners for more personnel to further bolster those already in the unit. One of Doolittle’s Captains is a former Department of Public Safety Lieutenant who will train proper traffic standards to his deputies.

The Sheriff on April 29th was headed out to Magnolia for the renaming of the County Annex there in honor of former Sheriff Tommy Gage in a surprise ceremony. Sheriff Doolittle was about to turn onto FM 1774 from FM 1488, when he happened upon a physical disturbance between two men on FM 1488. The aggressor had exited his vehicle and began a physical confrontation with another driver, and eventually pulled a gun, threatening the victim. That’s when Sheriff Doolittle rolled up and within seconds of the altercation had defused the situation. The male suspect was arrested for Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon, while Doolittle continued onto the annex renaming ceremony.

Sheriff Wesley Doolittle pulling a gun on a suspect at a Road Rage incident in Magnolia on April 29th