When the Oconee County Democrats invited Oconee County Sheriff James Hale, a Republican, to speak to them last week, they asked him to talk about two issues, school safety and immigration.
Hale obliged, spending more than 50 minutes talking and answering questions about various aspects of those two topics.
Hale said he had started working on school safety protocols shortly after he joined the Sheriff’s Office in February of 2001 and immediately realized that he needed to work closely with Oconee County Schools.
Those efforts culminated in creation of a 16-person School Resource Officer Division within his force in January of 2025. He said school leaders had been “very resistant” to the program prior to the school shooting in Barrow County in September of 2024.
Hale said he was strongly opposed to legislation proposed in the most recent session of the General Assembly that would have mandated a “weapons detection system” at each main entrance to Oconee County Schools, calling it an “unfunded mandate” that was difficult to staff and operate correctly.
Hale said his office cooperates with Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) in turning over people in the jail for whom he has a warrant and that his officers will issue a detainer warrant to hold someone at the request of ICE. This has only happened twice, he said.
At the same time, he said his deputies would not make traffic stops to find people who may be in the country illegally, calling that “illegal” profiling.
“I know I'm speaking to the Oconee Democrats,” Hale said during the school safety discussion and the only point in the evening where political party was a part of the conversation, “so I'm going to speak a little Republican right now. But guns don't kill people. People kill people. Okay?”
Focus On School Security
“One of my passions has always been school safety,” Hale said as he began his comments at the May 7 meeting of the Oconee County Democrats. The tragedy of the Columbine High School shooting in April of 1999 resulted in his focusing on that issue, he added.
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| Hale 5/7/2027 |
“Everybody was changing the way law enforcement did things when it comes to school shootings,” Hale told the audience of 28 at the Oconee County Library. Another person joined online.
“The paradigm had shifted, obviously, because so many people got injured and killed in that incident,” he said. “The first law enforcement didn't have the tools, the tactics, or the knowhow to go in and deal with something like that.”
“As unfathomable as that may sound, they surrounded the building and made sure nobody got in, nobody got out, and waited for SWAT to get there. Well, by the time SWAT got there, things had gone drastically bad.” Thirteen students and a teacher were killed in the Colorado high school.
Hale said when he joined the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office in 2001 after three years at the Sheriff’s Office in Barrow County, then Sheriff Scott Berry was working on “a plan of how he would want Oconee Sheriff's Office to respond to something like that.”
Berry “started sending me all over the United States to go to training for how to deal with these and how to train our people to do it better,” Hale said.
“And that's when we started working really hard with the schools because we realized the only way we can actually get this training in our schools is to have the schools allow us to come there and train,” he said.
“For many years, I did that training,” Hale said, “starting out at the School Board office with the Superintendent's Office and all of the principals in the schools. And then once we started doing that training with them, we started doing it for every faculty, staff at the school system at least once a year, every year since then.”
“So, all of our teachers, even the custodians in the school, the bus drivers, go through this training,” he said.
The goal of the training, he said, is to identify school shooters before they become school shooters.
Current Security In Place
Hale said he and then Sheriff Berry began talking with Oconee County Schools about establishing a school resource officer program when John Jackson was Superintendent. Jackson served from July 2008 to May 2012.
“They didn't want anything to do with it because of the perception,” Hale said. They said “We don't want our kids to go to a building that looks like a prison to learn how to do stuff every day.”
As a result, Hale said, he and Berry started working on “the infrastructure itself.” The result was creation of security vestibules at each of the system’s 12 schools.
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| Hale Responding To Question On Legislation 5/7/2026 |
“Most of our schools in the system,” Hale said, “you could walk in the front door of the school, and it was up to you as a parent or anybody else to go into the office to check in, and then you had access to the rest of the school.”
“When you walk in the door (today),” he said, “you can't get past that lobby area without going over to the office to be buzzed in,” Hale said.
Hale also said that through his collaboration with Dallas LeDuff, then Associate Superintendent of Oconee County Schools, Oconee County Schools became “the first school system in the state of Georgia to have the Centegix CrisisAlert system.”
With this system, “teachers wear a little badge, their name badge or whatever, around their chest. And it's got a button on it,” Hale said.
“As soon as they push that button, it's connected to every one of those little beacons throughout the school,” he said. “The beacons start flashing red. The intercom system in the school starts telling them what to do. Lock down, get out of sight, turn off the lights, lock the doors, make sure the doors are all shut.”
“As soon as that system goes off, not only does it go off inside that school, but it goes off on my phone, it goes off on every single one of my deputy's phones, and it goes off in my dispatch.”
School Resource Officers
“We talked about school resource officers every year on an annual basis,” Hale said, asking "Do you think we're at the point where we need them now?"
“And the school system had kind of gotten some flak...from some of the people in the public,” he said. “But they still were very resistant to it.” (Four citizens spoke before the Board in April of 2023 asking that officers be placed in each of the schools.)
That changed on Sept. 4, 2024, Hale said, when two students and two teachers were killed and seven others were injured in a school shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County.
“That day was the first time we had actual school resource officers in our schools because I assigned my two traffic units that I had at the Sheriff's Office,” Hale said. “We disbanded the traffic unit. We figured right now traffic's not as important as that is.”
“So those two deputies went to both the high schools,” he said, “and then all the other deputies pretty much surrounded the rest of our schools just to make sure that we didn't have any incidents here.”
In January of 2025 the Board of Education signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Board of Commissioners and the Sheriff’s Office that calls for up to 16 officers. The Board of Commissioners funds the Sheriff’s Office.
“I have 16 positions,” Hale said. “So I had to create an entire division at the Sheriff's Office to control School Resource.”
“The SRO division commander is a captain. He's actually stationed at Malcolm Bridge Middle (School). His second in command is going to be a lieutenant. He's actually at Colham Ferry Elementary.”
“And then I have a pair of sergeants when we're fully staffed,” he said. “What they'll do is each sergeant will be assigned six schools. So we'll have the Red Side sergeant, and we'll have the Blue Side sergeant, and they'll be in charge of their six schools each.” (Red Side Schools feed to and include North Oconee High School, and Blue Side feed to and include Oconee County High School.)
“And basically, their job will be to go around and make sure all the other deputies that are working in the schools are doing what they're supposed to do, that they're there on time, if they need anything.”
They also will cover for those other deputies if they are sick or if they have to leave the building for some reason, Hale said. Hale said he cannot simply pull an officer from his traffic division to file a temporary vacancy because they are not likely to be trained for the work of a School Resource Officer,
Hale told the audience that he currently has 11 officers in the schools, with two officers hired but in training. At present, one officer is serving two of the system’s 12 schools.
The Oconee County Board of Education on Monday night adopted a tentative budget for Fiscal Year 2027 that funds only 12 SRO slots. The School Board funds 90 percent of the costs of the SRO program, with the county picking up the remaining 10 percent.
“Since we haven’t filled those positions yet,” Hale said in an email message after the budget was released Monday night, “we will hold two positions open for right now. That still has all 12 schools with an SRO and two supervisors.”
Legislation
Oconee County Democratic Party Chair Harold Thompson asked Hale to “weigh in on your perspective” on House Bill 1023, which did not pass but would have required each local school board to “implement a weapon detection system” to be utilized “at all main points of entry to such permanent buildings.”
“I oppose it 100 percent,” Hale said. .
“Even if they narrowed it down to where there were only a couple of doors in each school in Oconee County, that was going to be the entry, exit point at 72 locations,” he said.
“Any system can be defeated, and it's only as good as the man or woman who is standing there actually watching the stuff go down,” Hale said. “That means that one of these systems has to have two people to operate it. Two. One is looking at the screen, the other one's looking at the person.”
“It's an unfunded mandate, and I will never support an unfunded mandate,” he said.
“If they come up with a way to pay for it, that's fine,” he said. “I'll do whatever the people want me to do, but you can't afford that.”
State House District 121 Rep. Eric Gisler, who was in the audience, said he voted against HB 1023 after the bill sponsor told him there was no new money to pay for the devices or their staffing in the bill.
Hale turned to Gisler and asked him to address one concern he has if Gisler is re-elected in November and returns to the state House next year.
“Private schools are private,” Hale said. “They're a lot different than public schools as far as what the law requires of them to do when it comes to certain things.”
“When it comes to a child that makes a threat at a school, in the Oconee School System, we know that we're going to be notified of that immediately,” Hale said, “and we're going to take proper action with it.”
“And the private schools don't have to notify us,” he said.
“Mr. Representative, we've been working on that,” Hale said.
Immigration
Hale told the group that his jail is part of the federal 287G program that allows his officers to sign a warrant “when there's a person who's locked up in jail who already has a detainer warrant from ICE.” (ICE is Immigration and Custom Enforcement.)
“And instead of that ICE agent having to come, that deputy that works in the jail is sworn as a warrant service officer to where he can actually sign that. He can actually sign that document to say, ‘This person's in this jail. We've notified ICE that they're here.’”
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| Hale Responding To A Question On Immigration 5/7/2026 |
“I think we have used it twice,” Hale said.
“Now, what I will tell you about this program, and what I will tell you about local law enforcement versus federal law enforcement,” Hale said, “is federal law enforcement, I can't tell them they can't do their job, but I ain't got to help them.”
“They can't tell me I have to help them, yet,” he added.
The Republican Ballot in the upcoming May 19 primary has a nonbinding question, Hale noted, asking if laws should be enacted “punishing local law enforcement who refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities in the deportation of illegal aliens charged with serious crimes.”
“And my answer is no,” Hale said, “and I'll tell you why my answer is no, because there's no due process.”
“There's nothing in the Constitution that says, once you're here, you can't be here because you got here illegally," Hale said. “There's nothing in the Constitution of the State of Georgia that says you can't live here illegally.”
“The law, federal law says you can't come into the country illegally,” Hale said, “But once you get here, there's nothing that says you can't be here. If you're here, you're afforded the exact same rights as every other American on the face of the planet.”
“You're afforded those rights. That's the Constitution.” Hale said. “That's what I'm sworn to uphold.”
“I'm not going out looking for somebody just to make a traffic stop just to ask them what their immigration status is,” Hale said. “That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. It's not going to happen.”
“It's profiling. It's 100 percent profiling,” he said, “and it's not legal, and it's not legal anywhere in the United States. Not legal in Georgia either.”
“There's a whole demographic of people that live in this county right now that are scared to death to leave their house,” he said. “And I will use some strong words. That's BS. That's just not right.”
Video
The video below is of the entire meeting of the Oconee County Democratic Party.
Hale began his comments at 1:10 in the video, starting with school safety.
Hale began talking about immigration at 41:50 in the video.
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