Sheriff Eric Wallen presented data on county law enforcement over the past year, during Tuesday’s Lyon County Board meeting.

MARSHALL — The Lyon County Sheriff’s Office received more than 7,900 calls for service over the past year – a figure that was down a little from 2024, Lyon County Sheriff Eric Wallen said this week.

Wallen reported on Sheriff’s Office activity in 2025 for County Commissioners on Tuesday, and went over statistics for everything from 911 calls, to the number of people booked into the county jail.

“We did this last year for the first time, and brought it back this year just to keep up the insight for the board, and the transparency of kind of what goes on in our law enforcement world on an annual basis,” Wallen said.

The Sheriff’s Office received a total of 7,965 calls for service in 2025, compared to 8,134 in 2024. Wallen said there were also a few areas that had changed in the type of incidents deputies responded to over the past year.

“A couple of the biggest ones were traffic numbers. We were down a little bit in 2025,” he said. The Sheriff’s Office had 3,385 traffic stops over the past year, compared to 3,942 in 2024.

“We had a lot of stops in 2024. We dropped a little bit in 2025, down to just over 3,300 traffic stops throughout the year,” Wallen said. “A part of that is we had one of our most productive traffic enforcement deputies deployed. So that was a big chunk of activity.”

Wallen said there was also a big change in the number of residence checks reported by the Sheriff’s Office – there were over 500 residence checks in 2025, compared to just 10 in 2024.

“That’s not because we’re doing more, it’s just how we’re tracking it,” Wallen said. Before, the Sheriff’s Office would create a report for a residence check and then update it for subsequent calls at the same residence. “We weren’t really effectively tracking every deputy’s activity. Now we create a new incident for each time we go check on a residence.”

The Lyon County dispatch center received a total of 6,537 emergency calls in 2025. “That was a decent jump, about 700 calls above 2024,” Wallen said.

Wallen also shared data about the Lyon County Jail over the past year.

“In 2025, we had 721 bookings into the jail. So not necessarily different people, but we had 721 people come into the jail,” Wallen said. Out of the total number of bookings, 677 were people arrested by Lyon County or one of the police departments within the county. The remaining 44 bookings were inmates being housed at the Lyon County Jail as part of a contract with Murray County.

On average, there were about 28 or 29 people in the Lyon County Jail per day in 2025, Wallen said. The average length of a stay in the jail was 13.07 days.

“Most of the people are only (there) two or three days,” Wallen said. “This takes into account those that stay with us for nine or 10 months, but in general people are here less than five days.”

“Is the court lessening the amount of time that they serve?” asked Commissioner Todd Draper.

Wallen said the amount of time that people spend in jail can be influenced by factors like state legislation and rules that set lower guidelines for bail amounts.

“That allows people to get out of jail much sooner. They don’t have to sit and wait for the court case to work its way through the system, they can afford to bail out and return to society,” Wallen said.

Some new information included in Wallen’s presentation was the number of public data requests the Sheriff’s Office received over the past two years.

“We’ve noticed a significant increase in our public data requests. I wanted to include this for your information, because these have become real time-consuming things for our office,” Wallen said.

In 2025, the Sheriff’s Office received 371 data requests, compared to 391 in 2024. However, the number of files requested in 2025 had gone up. All together, the data requested totaled up to roughly 12.2 gigabytes.

“I just talked to our records person this morning, and about 30% of her time now is spent fulfilling these data requests,” Wallen said. Requests can be made by media outlets, people involved in a service call, or third parties like lawyers working on a criminal case.