The following is a look at Karl W. Bickel’s latest “Common Sense” column, published by the Emmitsburg News-Journal in its September 2026 edition. Karl served as second in command at the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office and sits on the board of the Advocates for Aging of Frederick County, and here he explains why the county’s fast-growing senior population needs a renewed, dedicated approach to policing.
Time to bring back senior-focused policing
Frederick County is the fastest-growing county in Maryland, and its senior population is growing even faster than that, at nearly three times the state’s overall rate. Bickel points to census figures showing the county’s 65-and-over population rose 52 percent between 2010 and 2020, with residents 85 and older growing at an even steeper pace. That is not, he argues, a temporary bump in the numbers. It is a lasting shift in who lives in the county, and it calls for an equally lasting shift in how the Sheriff’s Office polices and protects its oldest residents.
Bickel writes from experience: during his years at the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office, including a stint as second in command, the agency ran a dedicated senior-focused infrastructure built around three programs. A TRIAD partnership brought local law enforcement and senior citizens into an ongoing conversation about safety. A SALT Council, Seniors and Law Enforcement Together, gave older residents a standing voice in shaping the sheriff’s priorities. And an Adopt-a-Senior program paired deputies with elderly residents in their own patrol areas for regular, personal check-ins.
Those programs, he says, built real relationships rather than one-off outreach: deputies came to know their senior neighbors well enough to notice when something was off, and seniors came to know their deputies well enough to call before a scam succeeded rather than after. Bickel notes that as the Sheriff’s Office’s priorities shifted over time, those programs quietly faded, even as the population they served kept growing.
The column argues the stakes have only risen since then. Elder financial exploitation has surged nationally, fueled by increasingly sophisticated phone, email and AI-generated voice scams, with reported losses from fraud against Americans 60 and older reaching into the billions of dollars a year. More seniors are also aging in place, living alone rather than in assisted living, which means fewer people are positioned to notice when something goes wrong. A deputy who already knows a resident, Bickel writes, is one of the most effective safeguards against both fraud and isolation-related emergencies.
Bickel points to other jurisdictions that have rebuilt similar infrastructure without significant cost: Aurora, Illinois has a dedicated Senior Safety and Resources Unit; San Diego County’s sheriff runs a daily-call and weekly-visit program for isolated seniors; and sheriff’s offices in Maine and Virginia have launched automated wellness-check systems that flag deputies when a senior doesn’t respond. TRIAD and SALT councils, he notes, remain active in many jurisdictions nationwide precisely because they are inexpensive to run and pay off in trust and early scam detection.
His recommendation for Frederick County is to rebuild and modernize the framework rather than simply restore it: reviving TRIAD and SALT with a formal, ongoing role in shaping policy; updating Adopt-a-Senior with modern check-in technology; training deputies specifically in elder fraud investigation; and coordinating directly with the county’s Division of Aging and Independence and groups like Advocates for the Aging of Frederick County. As Bickel puts it, Frederick County’s senior residents “chose this community,” and the county owes them a Sheriff’s Office that treats their safety as the priority it once was.
Karl W. Bickel (karlbickel@comcast.net), a Democratic candidate for Frederick County sheriff, is retired from the U.S. Department of Justice, was previously second in command of the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office and is a former assistant professor of criminal justice.
Read the full column at the Emmitsburg News-Journal: Time to bring back senior-focused policing | COMMON SENSE
