Overwhelmed and understaffed, the Shelby County Health Department will employ the services of Security Pro 24/7 to help with enforcing COVID-19 restrictions.
Security Pro 24/7 helps enforce the mask mandate and social distancing requirements by following up on complaints the health department receives. The company also serves Monroe County.
“We don’t have enough people, so, Security Pro,” Health Department Director Robert Lewis told the Shelby County commissioners at their Monday morning meeting.
“With us having four nurses and us doing the testing, the (flu) vaccines that we’re doing, I have nine staff,” Lewis continued, “and one is out because of COVID and pneumonia, so that just leaves me and I’m on the phone all the time.”
Security Pro 24/7 offers its services to Monroe County, where its staff travels around to bars, restaurants, and box stores and works with the owners/staff members to educate people and gain compliance through education.
“Our goal is to educate people on social distancing and mask wearing,” VP of operations Aaron Waltz said. “It’s not a hard fist, ‘Wear your mask, you’re gonna get a ticket.’”
They do have tickets they can issue in Monroe County, but they haven’t had to issue any yet.
“We want to represent your health department and your county as best we can,” Waltz told the commissioners.
Waltz added that their presence allows restaurant owners to enforce COVID-19 restrictions without losing service because the locals can blame his company.
“One of the big things, is when we go into the restaurants, we get bar and restaurant owners say, ‘well, they just don’t want to wear it,’” he said. “Well, this gives them the opportunity for us to be the bad guy. We understand that nowadays, people don’t want to lose business because they have to tell people they have to wear a mask.”
“They can pin it on us and say, ‘look, the compliance officers are the ones making us do it. We don’t have the ability to control it,’” he added. “So we take a lot of that burden for them so they’re not the bad guys losing the business by telling people they have to leave.”
Security Pro 24/7 showed the commissioners their uniform they wear in Monroe County, which is a shirt that has the Monroe County Health Department logo on the front and reads “compliance officer” on the back.
“We’re not a health department official so to speak, we work for your health department,” Waltz said.
Waltz said when they started in Monroe County, they patrolled mostly the college bars – Indiana University Bloomington is located in Monroe County. Waltz said they check on the bars multiple times a night.
“We’ve since grown to restaurants during the day, box stores during the day, anywhere they get complaints,” he said. “We did the farmer’s market this weekend, they had an indoor farmers market we work with. It’s grown into more of an extension of the health department.”
The company tracks which businesses it goes out to and the number of times it goes out. Waltz said they take extensive notes to provide the health department with this information, in case the health department has any questions.
The commissioners approved this partnership through the end of January. Lewis and Waltz are working on a contract which the commissioners will have to sign during their next meeting.
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