GRANTS WILL HELP AREA LAW OFFICIALS

Sheriff's deputies in Cape Girardeau County and police in Chaffee, Mo., will add equipment through federal grants approved this week.

The Cape Girardeau County sheriff's office will give new walkie-talkies and bulletproof vests to deputies who work in the jail through a federal block grant program, Capt. Ruth Ann Dickerson said.

Some 105 law enforcement agencies in the state received the grants, made available through the U.S. Justice Department and distributed through the Missouri Department of Public Safety.

Requests for the grant, which requires a 10 percent cash match, cannot exceed $10,000.

The sheriff's department estimated costs of eight vests and seven walkie-talkies at $8,630, Dickerson said. Better communications equipment became necessary when the county's new jail opened with eight new deputies. Dispatchers could not communicate with deputies moving prisoners inside the jail.

"We have so much new concrete and steel, the signals just weren't getting through," Dickerson said. "Our two-channel radios don't work."

Deputies have worked with radios borrowed from a local business, which had made the loan in anticipation of being paid through the grant.

Eight bulletproof vests, worth $300 each, will also be purchased, Dickerson said.

Chaffee police will get $7,697 in federal money to purchase a base station radio, chief Don Cobb said. For years, the department has used portable radios to monitor communications.

"We can only monitor one channel at a time, so we have to pick and choose what we listen to," Cobb said.

A problem develops whenever Chaffee has a fire, because police must choose to monitor radio communications either at the fire scene or from officers on patrol.

Police expect to get the new radio equipment within six weeks, Cobb said.