Comanche County
OKLAHOMA CITY – A military veteran and tribal police officer is making his second bid to become the next Sheriff of Comanche County.
For the last eight years, Dell Galloway of Lawton has served in the Comanche Nation Police Department, where he is a lieutenant and a patrol supervisor.
The Comanche Nation Police Department provides service on Comanche Nation trust land. The tribe has trust property in eight counties, including Comanche, Caddo, Cotton, Kiowa and Tillman, Galloway said.
“Our biggest considerations are home security and the tribal casinos” in Cotton and Comanche counties, he said. But tribal law enforcement officers also respond to calls about poachers and trespassers during hunting and fishing seasons, and about domestic disturbances.
Galloway holds a federal commission through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which enabled him to work for a month on the 2.2 million-acre Crow Reservation in Montana earlier this year “because they were shorthanded.” He previously was a reserve police officer in Geronimo and at Medicine Park.
The 54-year-old candidate has been married for 31 years and has three adult children. Military service is a hallmark of their family. Galloway spent a decade and a half in the armed forces. That included eight years in the Marine Corps, during which he served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Afterward he joined the Army, where he served for six and a half years until he sustained a back injury and was honorably discharged.
During his stint in the Army he was stationed at Fort Sill. “That’s what brought me here,” the Marietta, Ga., native said. He was a noncommissioned officer in both branches of the military.
Galloway met his wife while both were in the Marine Corps. Their oldest son is a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, and another son is a former Marine who now works for a contractor at Fort Sill. Their daughter is a U.S. Navy veteran who is employed as a civilian police officer at Fort Sill. Gallo- way’s mother was an Army nurse, and his father and father-in-law both served in the Marine Corps.
Galloway, a Republican, previously ran for Comanche County Sheriff in 2012. He said that if elected he would like to start an Explorer group in which young adults would “shadow” the county’s deputies to see firsthand how they do their jobs.
He said he would have his deputies crackdown on speeders on county roads. And he would conduct “town hall” meetings throughout the county on a regular basis. Those occasions would provide citizens with an opportunity to “tell me what’s happening in their communities and what the Sheriff’s Department is doing or should be doing to help them feel safer.”