Harris County Sheriff's Office

The Harris County Sheriff’s Department of Texas is the third largest sheriff’s office in the United States, and is the largest sheriff’s office within the state of Texas. Currently the HCSO serves to protect a community that is based on roughly 4 million individuals. This poses quite the challenge because of the enormity of the community and the ration of law enforcement agents to citizens. Roughly the ration has 1000 law enforcement officials per 1 million individuals.

The head of this office is the Harris County Sheriff; the county sheriff is an elected official who primarily takes care of the administrative and delegation tasks. For example, the sheriff is the official who chooses what type of investigations or work is done by the squads, and where the squads are supposed to respond to if they are currently in-house.

The HCSO has various stations throughout the county, in order to provide services and security to each area. The Harris County Sheriff has the ability to travel to each of these facilities in order to check on the functionality of them, and to address any problems that the squads or the stations could be having.

Aside from working as a strict law enforcer, the Harris County Sheriff is also required to authorize and secure legal documents, in order for individuals to be processed in court regarding subpoenas and various other issues.

Essentially, the Harris County Sheriff is required to do all the work regarding the decision making and legality aspects regarding the operation and conduct of the HCSO.

NEXT: Hernando County Sheriff’s Office