Field Notes · The issue
Why Cumberland County keeps losing deputies
Ask anyone inside the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office what the biggest problem is and you will not get an argument about crime statistics. You will get an answer about people leaving.
A pay plan older than most of the deputies it governs
The document that governs what a Cumberland County deputy earns and how they advance — the career development plan — has not been rewritten since 1980. That is not a campaign talking point. It is what the county’s own sitting sheriff said this year when asked what the agency’s biggest fight was, and his answer was retention: keeping the people already here. Every surrounding agency recruits against a pay ladder built before most of today’s deputies were born.
What would actually change it
A sheriff cannot set the budget alone; the county commissioners do that. What a sheriff can do is arrive with a costed, current plan instead of a complaint — a rewritten career ladder, benchmarked against the agencies Cumberland County actually loses deputies to, with the turnover cost of doing nothing attached to it. Training a deputy who leaves in three years is the most expensive way to run an agency, and it is the one this county has defaulted into.
Where these numbers come from
The 1980 figure and the characterisation of retention as the agency’s central problem come from the sitting sheriff’s own remarks to CityView NC during the 2026 primary. The sheriff’s office and detention budgets — about $36.2 million and $22.4 million — are the county’s published figures. If any of that changes, this page should change with it.
Paid for by Windham for Sheriff.