Deputies Expand Traffic Enforcement While Keeping Core Duties Intact

Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office Turns Up the Heat: Deputies Expand Traffic Enforcement While Keeping Core Duties Intact

12/05/2025

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office is widening its footprint on the streets, ramping up both traffic enforcement and narcotics investigations — without pulling deputies from their daily obligations inside courtrooms or serving warrants across the county.

Chief Deputy Col. Steve Healey said the move isn’t a shift in mission but an expansion of long-standing work that many residents may not realize deputies are already doing.

“We’ve heard the calls from the community,” Col. Healey said. “People want nuisance crimes addressed. They want speeding addressed. They want safer neighborhoods — and that’s what we’re focused on.”

The sheriff’s office is developing two full-time units: the Community Action Response Team, known as CART, and a dedicated traffic unit. While CART handles quality-of-life issues like car break-ins, chronic speeding and illegal dumping, the traffic team will target dangerous driving not just on major roadways but in residential areas where the risks can be deadliest.

Col. Healey said too many families have seen the aftermath of high-speed crashes. “It’s horrific,” he said. “If someone is doing 50 or 60 miles an hour down a 25-mile-an-hour street where kids are playing, that’s a tragedy waiting to happen.”

But even as those enforcement efforts grow, deputies will continue their core responsibilities — courthouse security, tax collection, vehicle inspections and serving emergency protective orders and warrants. Col. Healey stressed that nothing is being sacrificed.

“We are still going to make sure our courthouses are safe. We’re still going to serve DVOs and EPOs. Those duties come first,” he explained. “We’re simply integrating enforcement with the responsibilities we already have.”

Deputies are also leaning harder into drug interdiction. Col. Healey highlighted a major seizure just a day earlier — 108 pounds of marijuana and roughly 2.5 pounds of fentanyl-heroin mixture — as an example of the high-level trafficking the agency is targeting.

“This isn’t about someone smoking a little weed,” he said. “These are criminal organizations funding violence and flooding our streets with fentanyl. Families shouldn’t have to bury loved ones because they took something they didn’t realize was a pressed fentanyl pill.”

The task force unit, which works alongside federal partners, will continue to grow, Col. Healey said. Deputies also carry Narcan and frequently use it during overdose calls.

The sheriff’s office doesn’t see the traffic or drug initiatives as competing with other agencies such as Louisville Metro Police or Kentucky State Police. Col. Healey said the departments work together when needed, especially on large-scale operations like potential highway takeovers.

One immediate priority, he said, is improving communication about what deputies already do — a point driven home when residents expressed surprise that the sheriff’s office performs traffic stops at all.

“We are an accredited law enforcement agency,” Col. Healey said. “We just haven’t always done a great job telling our story.”

Col. Healey said the motivation behind the increased visibility is simple: “The measure of any agency is its relationship with the public. Our job is to make sure people feel safe in their neighborhoods. That’s what this is about.”