Twenty-Seven Years With the Badge, and Five High Schools That Got an Officer in 1993

Truman Jones died Wednesday, September 9, at the age of 87. For most of the people who will read that sentence in Rutherford County, no further identification is necessary. He was the sheriff — not a sheriff, but the one who held the office for twenty-seven years and became, by the end of it, the second-longest-serving sheriff in Tennessee.

The arithmetic of that career is worth pausing on. He joined the Rutherford County Sheriff's Office in 1972, when the county's population was a fraction of what it is now and Murfreesboro was still a courthouse town with a university attached. He was elected sheriff in 1983. He was still sheriff twenty-seven years later, by which point Rutherford had become one of the fastest-growing counties in the state, the interstate corridor had filled in, and the job he was elected to in the early eighties had been replaced — while he was doing it — by a fundamentally different one.

Careers that long produce a lot of ribbon-cuttings and a lot of plaques. Most of them fade. One thing Jones did has not.

Nineteen ninety-three

In 1993, Jones and the county schools superintendent at the time, Elam Carlton, put sworn deputies inside five Rutherford County high schools full time. The idea now has a familiar acronym and a permanent line in the school budget. Then it was an experiment, and a fairly unusual one — a sheriff and a school superintendent deciding, in a mid-sized Tennessee county, that officers ought to be in the building every day rather than arriving after something happened.

The first five were Barry Benham, Phil Brooks, Dan Goodwin, Bill Kennedy and Bill West. Thirty years later, in the fall of 2023, all five of them and Jones walked to midfield at a Siegel–Riverdale football game under a saber arch from the Siegel honor guard, escorted by highway patrol and city and county officers, and were recognized in front of a stadium full of people who had grown up with the program as simply the way school works. The county school system now has officers across its schools. The Siegel principal at that ceremony put it plainly: he could not imagine going to work without one in the building.

That is a specific and unusual kind of legacy. Most public officials are remembered for a building with their name on it. Jones is remembered — mostly unknowingly — by every Rutherford County student who has ever walked past a deputy in the cafeteria and thought nothing of it at all.

The second act

He did not disappear after leaving office. Jones spent years afterward on local talk radio, which in Middle Tennessee is not a retirement hobby so much as a continuation of the job by other means. A sheriff in a growing county spends decades learning how to explain things to people who are worried — about a road, a school, a neighbor, a rumor. He kept doing that, with a microphone instead of a cruiser, and stayed a familiar voice in the county long after his name came off the department letterhead.

The Sheriff's Office said this week that it is honoring his life and legacy. Rutherford County is a substantially different place than the one he started patrolling in 1972 — bigger, faster, more crowded, arguing constantly about growth. The institutions that survive that kind of change tend to be the ones that were built quietly, by people who were thinking about the county twenty years out rather than the next election. The program he started in 1993 is one of them.