Full Notification

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office is pleased to officially welcome four new Sheriff’s Deputies to its team.   On Thursday, June 5, at a traditional ceremony before a room of dignitaries, family and friends at the Calvary Chapel in Santa Maria, 28 recruits graduated from the prestigious Allan Hancock Law Enforcement College Academy.  Of those graduates, four were sponsored by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office.  They are Rockwell Ellis, Hartley Freedman, Ryan Kirk and Jeffrey Owen.   The rest of the graduating class included recruits sponsored by the Santa Maria Police Department, Lompoc Police Department, Pismo Beach Police Department, UCSB Police Department, Truckee Police Department, Santa Barbara Airport Police Department, San Luis Police Department and several self-sponsored recruits. 

In order to make it to graduation day, the recruits endured over 800 hours of training which included more than 2000 pushups.  The training topics included firearms, emergency vehicle operation, chemical agents, scenarios, report writing and numerous written exams.  The graduating class is the 106^th and the first one to graduate from the new Allan Hancock College Law Enforcement Training facility, a state-of-the-art, 37 million dollar campus in Lompoc.

The Sheriff’s Office also congratulates Deputy Jeffrey Owen for being named the class Valedictorian.

The new Sheriff’s deputies were sworn in by Sheriff Bill Brown and received their badges just after the graduation ceremony.  They have two more weeks of in-house training followed by a period of field training.