The Platte County Sheriff’s Office will enter into a contract for security services at local hospitals through an outside provider.
The contract was approved Monday, Nov. 21 at the administrative session of the Platte County Commission, held at the Platte County Resource Center in Kansas City North. The contract cost is $55 per hour for security officers of Homeland Security Protective Services to work at area hospitals.
“This will free up our officers to be back at the facility,” Shanks said.
According to Captain Jeffrey Shanks of the sheriff’s office, the department has increasingly been using overtime funds to pay for police protection of detention center inmates at the emergency room and during in-patient stays.
Over the past few years, Shanks said he’d seen hospital visits skyrocket from just a few times a month to sometimes multiple trips per day.
“We have no way of assessing whether or not if the hospital is going to admit,” he said, and when an inmate is admitted sheriff’s office personnel are forced to stay at the hospital to guard that inmate.
This leads to short staffing at the Platte County Detention Center, which itself is seeing record numbers of detainees.
Late last month, an inmate of the Platte County Detention Center escaped from an area hospital where he’d been taken for treatment.
According to the Platte County Sheriff’s Office, inmate Jacob Meineker escaped from custody at around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26 from Saint Luke’s Hospital on Barry Road.
An extensive search by members of the Platte County Sheriff’s Office and the Kansas City Police Department took place over the next several hours. Meineker was taken back into custody near Green Hills Road and North Shore Drive at 9:30 p.m. without further incident.
Meineker is currently being held in the Platte County Detention Center on $100,00 bond, charged with fleeing from authorities. He was charged in July with possession of a controlled substance and first taken into custody earlier this month.